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The Ozark Highlands Comprehensive Conservation Strategy: Coordinating the Identification of Conservation Opportunity Areas through Partnership
Early versions of state wildlife plans and comprehensive strategies lacked consistency in approach across states. Recognizing that these differences prevented integration into a cohesive vision for conservation across ecological regions (such as the Ozark Highlands), the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies developed “best practices” to guide future plan revisions. One best practice promotes the identification of spatially explicit conservation opportunity areas. However, this recommendation is hampered by lack of staff capacity and expertise within in any one state that can coordinate and share spatial data and supporting information across an ecological region. As conservation design at ecoregional scales becomes a necessary aspect of planning, conservation partnerships (i.e., LCCs, JVs) are becoming increasingly important to the conservation community. Leveraging these partnerships’ planning, coordination, and geospatial capacity offers an opportunity for states to align their action plans/strategies and provide relevance to larger partnership structures.
This presentation will describe a case study from the Ozark Highlands, where state plan/strategy Coordinators from Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma joined forces with staff from the Gulf Coastal Plains & Ozarks and the Central Hardwoods Joint Venture to develop spatially explicit conservation opportunity areas, providing ecoregional perspective to state priorities. Using a transparent, defensible, and replicable rule set, the data-driven approach developed by this team prioritizes the most ecologically appropriate habitats for conservation and restoration for each of 10 terrestrial habitats. Opportunities and challenges in implementing this approach – particularly identification and use of future scenarios and target species – will be highlighted and discussed.