As Rua mentioned last month, we’ve been working on an exciting update to the South Atlantic Blueprint that uses a better modeling approach, finer spatial resolution, and several new and improved indicators. We're so close to putting a draft online for you to review! The draft priorities are done, and we'll be finishing up corridors [...]
As development pressures increase, climatic patterns shift, and sea levels rise, the South’s forest resource is increasingly faced with fragmentation, degradation, and loss from land use conversion. Forestlands play a critical role in providing clean drinking water, wildlife habitat, and recreation opportunities, and in supporting rural economies based on traditional and non-traditional forest products. To [...]
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 [...]
Samworth WMA. Photo courtesy of Emily Purcell, Ducks Unlimited. One of the most common ways folks often use the Blueprint is to strengthen their grant proposals. Often, funders want to know how a proposed project contributes to regional objectives and partner priorities, and the Blueprint can serve as that shared strategy! The indicators [...]
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 [...]
As I mentioned last month, we're partnering with the wonderful folks at the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (SE CASC) to put on a great webinar series this April through July! These webinars will take place in our usual South Atlantic Third Thursday Web Forum Series time slot, on the third Thursday of every month [...]
This project explored landowner compliance with wildlife-friendly mowing recommendations and management to reduce woody encroachment in grasslands. Grassland photo by National Park Service. Okay, this paper is actually from Kentucky, but it provides a really interesting look at landowner compliance with terms of a grassland conservation program. We talk about landowner adoption rates [...]
Truck salting the roads. Photo by Kate Ter Haar, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0. Every winter, I wonder about the impacts of salting the roads on urban streams. We don't do it much around here, but it sure feels like a lot of salt. A recent paper looked a some of those impacts in [...]