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This is an instant app to view field survey data collected by SARP and partners using the North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaborative aquatic organism passage survey protocol
The Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation (CMRA) portal, an easily accessible and interactive geospatial website, will help federal, state, local and tribal governments as well as non-profit organizations learn about climate hazards impacting their communities.
NIDIS, in partnership with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, has launched a new map customization feature for Tribal Nations on the Drought.gov. This feature allows users to display reservation boundaries on any map on Drought.gov.
Effective management of marine mammal populations threatened by man-made impacts is particularly challenging for marine environments. Not only are these environments highly dynamic and difficult to observe, previous static management approaches have proven problematic or ineffective in marine environments, particularly for highly migratory species or for species undergoing distributional shifts due to climate change.
NOAA and partners released Implementing the Steps to Resilience: A Practitioner's Guide, a handbook for national climate resilience. The book, with accompanying online resources, is designed to help climate adaptation practitioners work with local governments and community organizations to incorporate climate risk into equitable, long-term decision-making. With this user-friendly guide, resilience and adaptation professionals can learn how to implement the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit’s Steps to Resilience.
Atmospheric aerosols are effective at scattering light and causing reduced visibility, and the extent to which this process occurs can be linked to overall aerosol concentrations and human health impacts. Measurements taken during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) campaign provide a record of this aerosol light scattering during the 2019 wildfire season in the western U.S.
The Atlantic Coast Joint Venture Black Duck Decision Support Tool (DST) helps to identify the exact number of acres to protect, restore or maintain at the small watershed scale. Through this tool, land managers can determine the best way to contribute to achieving black duck goals anywhere on the landscape.
Using radiotelemetry, we studied overwintering behavior and interactions with fire in a forest-dwelling terrestrial turtle, the Eastern Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina), over an eight-year period at two sites that use prescribed fire in forest management.
This study compared Bog Turtle population demography and habitat use from 1994 to 2009 at two sites in Massachusetts, USA: one site was managed for nonnative invasive species and natural succession (Site 1), and the other site was flooded from American Beaver (Castor canadensis) activity resulting in an expansion of nonnative invasive plants (Site 2).
This study presents results from a single wetland complex in New York, USA, which we managed primarily with cattle grazing over four and a half growing seasons. Management effectiveness was assessed by monitoring Bog Turtle nest placement, habitat use via radio tracking, and vegetation structure and composition change in permanent plots.
The demise of small-scale dairy farming over the past three decades has led to the pastoral abandonment of the majority of bog turtle habitats in the Northeast. As a consequence, habitats are being degraded by the growth of invasive flora, changes in hydrology, and the loss of turtle microhabitats created by livestock.
The “Bootjack Fire Station Water Storage Project” included the installation of a new water tank at a local fire station in the disadvantaged community of Bootjack. The project’s purpose was to increase local water storage to fight the growing number of wildfires in the region.
The WFCA Fire Map pulls data from the US Forest Service via National Interagency Fire Center IRWIN feed, and 911 Dispatch data via PulsePoint to track the location of the wildfire as they start and while they’re burning. The WFCA Fire Map is the first map of its kind to pull such data from 911 Dispatch in relevant areas.
A comparative study on remote sensing and field-based approaches to estimate ladder fuel density. Can densities from different approaches predict wildfire burn severity?
Recently improved inventories of aquatic barriers enable us to describe, understand, and prioritize them for removal, restoration, and mitigation. Through this tool and others, we empower you by providing information on documented barriers and standardized methods by which to prioritize barriers of interest for restoration efforts.
Accurately tracking and understanding wildland fire patterns across the Southeastern U.S. is a critical need identified by a consortium of conservation partners. The SE FireMap is a new product developed in 2020-21 to meet these needs, and funded by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service's Working Lands for Wildlife program under an agreement with the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities.
This tool allows users to search for literature on bird species-vegetation relationships in eastern and boreal forests of North America.
Prescribed fire training exchanges are designed to address the unique landscape needs while keeping community values in mind. These events provide valuable hands-on training opportunities for TREX participants. Prescribed fires, as part of a training exchange, can help communities and landscapes become more fire-adapted, reduce wildfire risk and help build a local workforce.
While sea level rise represents a looming threat to a range of coastal resources in the Northeast, the specific risks it poses to different species and habitats are difficult to predict. Determining which resources are most vulnerable, and understanding why, is critical for developing effective management strategies to sustain these resources into the future. By synthesizing current research on the vulnerabilities of fish and wildlife habitats in the coastal zone, identifying the major sources of uncertainty, and suggesting future research that can help support the ongoing conservation of coastal ecological resources, this report offers a valuable reference for individuals, organizations, and communities working to plan for and address sea level rise across the region.
Amphibians and reptiles are experiencing threats throughout North America due to habitat loss and other factors. To help conserve these species, this project will identify Priority Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Areas (PARCAs) that are most vital in sustaining amphibian and reptile populations, taking into account potential future climatic conditions.
In response to a need for better information about the location and status of rare and endemic plant species in the Northeast region, a team of botanists led by NatureServe conducted a broad-scale conservation assessment for vascular plants that occur from Virginia to Maritime Canada. The resulting report provides a prioritized list of rare, highly threatened, declining, or sensitive plant species identified for conservation action that can inform initiatives to protect ecological systems from the ground up.
An interactive map and Arc GIS query tool that helps prioritizes where to focus survey and restoration efforts for upgrading road-stream crossings (culverts and bridges).
Nature’s Network is a collaborative effort that brings together partners from 13 states, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nongovernmental organizations, and universities to identify the best opportunities for conserving and connecting intact habitats and ecosystems and supporting imperiled species to help ensure the future of fish and wildlife across the Northeast region.
A Marsh Migration Team is helping coastal communities in Maine explore how local policies or plans might address the expected inland movement of coastal marshes as sea levels rise. This collaborative effort is working with six Maine communities—Scarborough, Bath, Topsham, Phippsburg, Georgetown, and Bowdoinham—to understand the economic and resource values of coastal marshes, assess likely marsh migration, and develop adaptation strategies (recognizing the potential costs of not planning for predicted sea-level rise).
From warblers to hummingbirds to orioles, dozens of species of landbirds pass through the Northeastern United States during their annual migrations between breeding grounds in the United States and Canada to wintering grounds as far south as South America. In order to survive these long journeys, they need to be able to find areas to stop, rest, and replenish their energy along the way. Based on weather surveillance data and field surveys, this report and accompanying spatial data identify stopover sites across the region that are important for sustaining migratory landbird populations, offering guidance for resource managers to focus conservation efforts.
As part of a suite of aquatic habitat assessments and tools designed to support conservation efforts in the Northeast region, the environmental consulting firm Downstream Strategies developed predictive models for estuarine habitat in Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound, using winter flounder as the focal species to pilot the approach. This study describes the development of a flexible modeling process that can help scientists better understand the distribution, status, threats, and relative abundance of resources in dynamic aquatic habitats.
To effectively manage vital freshwater resources across large geographic areas, resource managers need the capacity to assess the status of aquatic species, their habitats, and the threats they face. This on-line decision support tool provides that capability for Eastern brook trout across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The tool allows users to characterize current and and potential future aquatic conditions, target and prescribe restoration and conservation actions, set strategic priorities, evaluate management efforts, and support science-based sustainable management plans on behalf of brook trout and associated species. The tool is accompanied by a user-friendly summary report and a technical report providing details on how the tool was created.
Species that depend on cold-water river habitat are vulnerable to warming from climate change, but just how vulnerable? Lingering uncertainties about the relationship between changing air and water temperatures, the capacities of different fish species to adapt to exposure, and the ways climate change will affect other environmental stressors like diseases, make it difficult to predict. In order to make informed decisions about protecting fish habitat, resource managers must understand the degree of the threat. This review offers a comprehensive overview of what is known, what remains uncertain, and what measures that can be taken now to reduce the future impacts of warming on cold water fish habitat.
Synthesizing sea-level rise and storm-threshold data for 44 fish, wildlife, and plant species of conservation concern, as well as for four coastal habitats, the new species threshold table for the multi-LCC coastal resilience project contains a wealth of information formatted into an easy-to-use spreadsheet to give stakeholders insight on decisions and tradeoffs regarding the management of coastal resources.
An inventory of the work being undertaken by coastal Landscape Conservation Cooperatives and partner organizations to address coastal resilience issues in the Atlantic, Gulf Coast, and Caribbean regions, this new resource offers a one-stop shopping list to support growing collaboration in coastal resilience. The list includes completed, ongoing, and planned projects, reports, guidebooks, programs, online support tools, and papers, searchable by type, organization, or date.
Nearly half of all Americans live and work in coastal counties, areas that also provide critical habitat for a diversity of fish and wildlife. However, the capacity for these places to support human and natural communities in the face of rising sea levels varies widely. In response to this threat, scientists from The Nature Conservancy evaluated more than 10,000 coastal sites in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic to determine their ability to provide a natural buffer to communities from increasing inundation by rising seas, as well as their capacity to sustain biodiversity.
Habitat for beach-nesting bird species such as piping plover, black skimmer, least tern, and American oystercatcher, is shrinking in New Jersey due to a number of threats, including coastal development, human disturbance, and non-native predators. To help municipalities and other beach landowners set aside important habitat for a set of priority species, scientists used distribution models for piping plover to identify areas that have the highest probability of nesting occurrence in the state.
Designed by scientists to simplify consistent data collection and management, the iPlover smartphone application gives trained resource managers an easy-to-use platform where they can collect and share data about coastal habitat utilization across a diverse community of field technicians, scientists, and managers. With the click of a button, users can contribute biological and geomorphological data to regional models designed to forecast the habitat outlook for piping plover, and other species that depend upon sandy beach habitat.
Climate change is expected to alter stream temperature and flow regimes over the coming decades, and in turn influence distributions of aquatic species in those freshwater ecosystems. To better anticipate these changes, there is a need to compile both short- and long-term stream temperature data for managers to gain an understanding of baseline conditions, historic trends, and future projections. The NorEaST web portal was developed to meet this need, serving as a coordinated, multi-agency regional framework to map and store continuous stream temperature locations and data for New England, Mid Atlantic, and Great Lakes States.
Loss of land as a result of increasing sea level is among the gravest threats that climate change poses to coastal areas, and one of the most difficult to prepare for because different beaches, barriers, and marshes can respond to sea level rise in various dynamic ways. By distinguishing between areas in the Northeast that are likely to experience flooding as a result of sea-level rise and those that are likely to respond dynamically to sea-level rise by moving or changing, this report offers a resource to support coastal management decisions at both regional and local scales in the context of accelerated change.
This collection of reports, databases, and data layers offers a birds-eye view of sandy beach and tidal inlet habitats within the U.S. Atlantic Coast breeding range of the endangered piping plover based on imagery from Google Earth, Google Maps, state agencies, municipalities, and private organizations. By comparing the location, status, and condition of potential plover breeding grounds from Maine to North Carolina during three distinct time periods -- before Hurricane Sandy, immediately after the storm, and three years after post-storm recovery efforts -- these inventories provide a habitat baseline that can help resource managers plan for future change.
Temporary wetlands called vernal pools provide important breeding grounds for reptiles and amphibians, but their seasonal nature can make them both difficult to find and to protect. The vernal pool mapper is now available to guide conservation of this important habitat. Based on a database of field-verified and remotely-sensed potential vernal pool locations compiled from across the Northeast, it can help identify priority areas for conservation and inform future surveys.
Integrating field data with the latest digital mapping technology, the Wetlands Mapper offers a portal through which anyone can access reliable wetlands science, and explore wetlands data with easy-to-use tools for displaying, manipulating, and querying information. The site also directs users to a wealth of other credible resources for identifying relevant scientific and geospatial information.
This collaborative project provided biologists and managers along the Atlantic coast with tools to predict effects of accelerating sea-level rise on the distribution of piping plover breeding habitat, test those predictions, and feed results back into the modeling framework to improve predictive capabilities. Immediate model results will be used to inform a coast-wide assessment of threats from sea-level rise and related habitat conservation recommendations that can be implemented by land managers and inform recommendations to regulators. Case studies incorporating resilience of piping plover habitat into management plans for specific locations demonstrate potential applications.
With the growing interest in offshore energy development along the eastern seaboard, it is increasingly important to determine the associated risks for the bird species that rely on this habitat. Although many efforts have been made to identify important habitat areas for marine birds, each focused on a different geography, and followed different protocols. Using an innovative modeling approach to synthesize historic data on 24 species of marine birds, this report and accompanying maps offer new insight for researchers and marine spatial planners about how these species use offshore waters.
The overall goal of this project was to compare maps and classification systems from various producers to identify opportunities for consolidating the strongest qualities in each mapping system in support of a long-term goal of a ‘best map’ for the Northeastern and Midwestern U.S.
Ecological processes don't stop at international borders, and neither will climate change. In order to understand how climate change will impact forested, agricultural, and wetland systems, resource managers on both sides of the border need to be able to see a continuous landscape. This web mapping tool lets users look at the full habitat picture from the North Atlantic United States to Atlantic Canada and southern Quebec, based on field-collected data and national and provincial datasets.
Combining spatial data with information from multiple assessments of fish habitat, this tool helps resource managers identify restoration projects that will support populations of aquatic species in the face of threats from climate change and development. Users can establish and rank conservation priorities, predict how species will fare under various management scenarios, and evaluate long-term conservation benefits for Eastern brook trout and associated species at multiple scales in multiple regions, including the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
What can we do today to ensure a sustainable future for the Connecticut River watershed? Connect the Connecticut is a collaborative effort to identify the best places to start: a network of priority lands and waters that can support wildlife and natural systems, with multiple pathways for migration, restoration, development, and conservation.
The purpose of this demonstration project was to show how North Atlantic LCC science products can be used to inform conservation for a Northeast habitat and resilience "hotspot." The Trust for Public Land integrated LCC and other science products into a clearinghouse and analysis tool for parcel-level conservation planning in the 2.7 million acre White Mountains to Moosehead Lake region of Maine and New Hampshire.
The Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) provides a comprehensive national framework for organizing information about coasts, oceans, and their living systems. But when integrating these data across different scales, is anything lost in translation? This report uses three pilot projects to assess how well the framework functions for classifying estuarine and marine environments at different scales.
Seamlessly linking datasets, models, and decision-support systems, this website offers a suite of tools designed to help resource managers make decisions related to protecting freshwater aquatic habitat, including a stream temperature database, a visualization for identifying priority catchments, and an interactive GIS map featuring data on Eastern brook trout.
These datasets depict the potential capability of the landscape throughout the Northeastern United States to provide habitat for a particular terrestrial representative species based on environmental conditions existing in approximately 2010. Landscape capability integrates habitat capability, climate niche, and prevalence, and is a measure of the relative capability of the landscape to support a given species.
Both a network of partners and a source of shared resources, the North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaborative (NAACC) offers a collaborative framework for taking on the critical task of assessing and upgrading the hundreds of thousands of outdated road-stream crossings across the region that represent barriers to wildlife movement and pose flooding risks to communities. The NAACC offers training in standard protocols for conducting assessments, online tools for prioritizing upgrades based on ecological benefits, and a database of road-stream crossings encompassing the 13 Northeast states.
The Northeast region is known for its wealth of lakes and ponds — more than 30,000 bodies of water that store freshwater, sustain a diversity of fish, birds, invertebrates, and aquatic plants, and support sport fisheries and recreational activities — and now there is a common way to classify them. Developed by experts from The Nature Conservancy, ten states, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the classification scheme is based upon four key variables that are used to organize aquatic natural communities, and can be mapped consistently across the region and United States.
This product assesses how vulnerable the Northeast's major terrestrial and wetland habitats are to climate change. Thirteen major ecosystem types occurring from Maine to Virginia and West Virginia were systematically evaluated through a collaborative process. The findings can be used in preparing for and adapting to a changing climate.
Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) assesses the capability of current and potential future landscapes to provide integral ecosystems and suitable habitat for a suite of representative species, and provides guidance for strategic habitat conservation.
Hurricane Sandy Tidal Marsh Resiliency Workshop
Presentation Hurricane Sandy Tidal Marsh Resiliency Partner Meeting December, 2014
Presentation from the Hurricane Sandy Workshop December 7-8, 2014
Combing a set of key metrics for intactness and resilience to measure the potential for individual sites to support biodiversity in the long term, this tool offers a way to prioritize actions intended to conserve high quality habitat by enabling users to compare the integrity of different sites of the same ecosystem type or habitat class.
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