Shared from Rua's post on the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS) blog This year’s report on progress toward the SECAS goal, Recent trends in Southeastern Ecosystems (2020), is now complete. Significant improvements over the last version include: A new indicator for areas without invasive plantsAn improved approach for water quality trends based on state dataUpdated data for [...]
The Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (SEAFWA) annual conference was last week, and that means an updated version of the Southeast Conservation Blueprint. Significant improvements over the last version include: Major improvements to the inland area covered by the South Atlantic Blueprint including finer resolution and a more connected network of priorities.Improvements to [...]
Cover of Black Rail Conservation Plan, featuring photo by Bob Gress. If you haven't already heard, the Black Rail Conservation Plan is now out. The South Atlantic has lots of important black rail habitat. We're also looking at using data from the effort to improve our marsh indicators. The newly released conservation plan [...]
Prescribed fire at St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. One thing we're hoping to improve for next year's South Atlantic Blueprint update is the previously burned pine habitat indicator. Getting polygons representing the burn history of sites across the entire South Atlantic has been difficult--especially [...]
South Atlantic Conservation Blueprint 2020 is now available! Thanks so much to the 111 people from 60 different organizations who reviewed the Blueprint during the virtual workshops. We were able to make a few improvements in the final Blueprint based on your comments - especially in the North and Central Coastal Plain subregions. We've fully [...]
In laboratory experiments, this pterapod shell dissolved over the course of 45 days in seawater adjusted to an ocean chemistry projected for the year 2100. Image from NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory (EVL). For those that haven't seen it yet, there's a new paper out covering the causes and consequences of coastal/ocean acidification in [...]
A very early draft of 2020 Blueprint priorities in the Piedmont. I've mentioned before that with the improved indicators and new 30m resolution, the 2020 South Atlantic Blueprint was going to be a great improvement over the current version. A few weeks ago, we also made a big methodological breakthrough in how we [...]
Photo courtesy of the Piedmont Prairie Partnership. Thanks to some recent progress on Piedmont prairies here in the South Atlantic, the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative decided to pilot some public surveys in the Piedmont. The surveys were focused on people's preferences and knowledge about grasslands in the Piedmont. They included questions about historic condition [...]
Suther Prairie in NC is an example of a wet prairie. Photo courtesy of Southeastern Grasslands Initiative. Thanks to some great progress in the Piedmont, the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative is piloting an approach for measuring public perceptions of grasslands right here in the Piedmont. There will be questions related to what people think [...]
You might remember the short videos on Piedmont prairies I wrote about a few months ago. As part of an effort to spread the word beyond the usual suspects, we submitted the short version of the video to the Longleaf Film Festival. The festival highlights short and feature-length documentary and narrative films with a connection [...]