Landscape Conservation Design in the Columbia Plateau

With support from the Great Northern LCC, the National Wildlife Refuge System in the Pacific Region engaged in a landscape scale design process in collaboration with the Arid Lands Initiative (ALI), a partnership of federal, state, and NGO entities.  This talk describes the evolution and results to date of the ALI conservation design process.  This includes collaborative conservation goal and target setting, spatial prioritization, a threats assessment, and a multi-scale assessment of ecological integrity of conservation priorities.  Future work will focus on facilitating the use of the landscape design into management planning and implementation.  This talk will focus on lessons learned through the process spatial prioritization and threats assessment.