VISUALIZING CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS FOR LANDSCAPE-SCALE CONSERVATION PLANNING IN FLORIDA

The Peninsular Florida LCC is part of a nationwide network of LCCs focused on bringing together public and private agencies and organizations of scientists, stakeholders, and decision-makers to inform conservation strategies and improve resource management decision-making on a landscape scale. Sea level rise over the next 50 years and beyond has the potential to disproportionately affect the State of Florida due to its low elevation. The range of impacts on the State’s ecosystems must be carefully analyzed and considered if appropriate action is to be taken. A team organized by the PFLCC has begun generating modeling scenarios on a statewide scale that vary based on several factors. Supporting datasets are also being used: inundation modeling of a 100-year event with and without sea level rise on 3 select counties; an update to the Critical Lands and Waters Identification Project (CLIP) database; and niche models for Florida’s threatened and endangered vertebrates under future climate conditions. USGS scientists working under the Joint Ecosystem Modeling (JEM) collaborative developed a visualization solution that bundles these datasets into a simple tool.

The EverVIEW Data Viewer application is a decision-support visualization tool used in restoration and planning efforts such as the Central Everglades Planning Project (CEPP) and the State of Louisiana’s 2012 Coastal Master Plan. EverVIEW has matured into a platform upon which extensions could be built, such as the PFLCC Scenarios Viewer extension, allowing more customized interaction targeting a non-technical audience. The extension makes it easy for the end user to find and visualize the PFLCC modeling datasets. The extension sets up the EverVIEW environment and automatically retrieves and loads the three statewide scenarios. Users can easily swap out other bundled datasets for side-by-side comparison and load polygons for state counties and conservation areas to examine specific regions under different conditions.