Piedmont prairie at Mason Farm Biological Reserve in Chapel Hill, NC. Photo by Rua Mordecai. More and more people seem to be talking about Piedmont prairies lately. It's another ecosystem that has gone through huge declines, but is starting to come back---thanks to the work of many dedicated people throughout the Piedmont. With [...]
This is a sneak peek at the draft report titled Recent Trends in Southeastern Ecosystems: Measuring progress toward the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS) Goal. Forested wetland birds is one of the 12 indicators covered in the report. There's more background about the goal on the SECAS website. Forested wetland birds Species trend data for [...]
I've been having a great time synthesizing recent trends in Southeastern ecosystem indicators. It's part of this year's report on progress toward the SECAS 10% goal, which is a major part of the upcoming symposium at SEAFWA this fall. There are lots of interesting results that you'll hear about soon. In the meantime, here's a [...]
Here are a few improvements we're working on getting into the next update of the Southeast Conservation Blueprint. These improvements will be particularly helpful when you want to use the South Atlantic Conservation Blueprint, but your questions also include areas it doesn't fully cover. We're hoping to have a draft of Version 4.0 of the [...]
Salt marsh in Core Banks, NC. Photo by John Buie/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Predicting where future salt marsh habitat will be, and how much we'll have, can be tricky. Over the last year or so, Amy and I have been working with Steve Hartley and Dan Stone from U.S. Geological Survey on improved [...]
Last month, Addie's blog talked about the Southeast Regional Partnership for Planning and Sustainability (SERPPAS) Good Map project. The idea is for the Good Map to serve as a visual way for diverse partners to identify overlapping interests and areas for collaboration where they could get mutual benefits. Sounds familiar, right? Mallory and I have [...]
Flooding on N.C. 12 on Pea Island in Dare County. Photo courtesy of NCDOTcommunications/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. As local governments throughout the South Atlantic struggle to adapt to sea-level rise, they're faced with a number of legal challenges. I'm sure you can think of at least 1 regularly flooded coastal road where you [...]
Shared from Rua's post on the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy blog Southeast Blueprint Version 3.0 identifies high value areas for conservation and restoration across the Southeast and Caribbean. Southeast Conservation Blueprint 3.0 data are now final and ready for you to use. The major improvements in this version include: Integration of new data from the Texas Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool (CHAT): This fills in [...]
Lately I've been helping the Southeast Regional Partnership for Planning and Sustainability (SERPPAS) improve the mapping of their priorities. SERPPAS is a six-state partnership comprised of state and federal agencies that promotes collaboration in making resource-use decisions supporting conservation of natural resources, working lands, and national defense. A big focus of the partnership is facilitating actions in [...]
A couple of weeks ago, the directors of the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (SEAFWA) unanimously approved an explicit goal for Southeastern ecosystems. This was a high priority improvement in the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS). I've been talking about the steps leading up to this goal in my last few blog posts. [...]