The National Workshop on Large Landscape Conservation

October 22 - 24, 2014

Over the last decade, new technologies and improvements in affordable computing power have allowed for significant advances in the way that researchers and conservation managers are approaching decisions of what land to protect. Publicly available datasets and satellite and aerial imagery have been steadily increasing in resolution and land managers are gaining access to information that allows them to identify, compare, and prioritize potential projects at a parcel scale across entire landscapes. Simultaneously, improvements in the ability to host large quantities of data and analysis tools online are opening new opportunities to share this information with the public to help inform large-landscape conservation planning.

This session will highlight a variety of approaches to large landscape conservation in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that are leveraging new technologies to improve their effectiveness and are helping connect conservation organizations to the landscapes in which they are working. Some of the projects detailed include: use of GIS and remote sensing for predicting the location of key cultural and historical resources along national trail corridors; creating high resolution land cover and hydrology datasets to identify ecologically valuable lands to maximize ecosystem service benefits; using a detailed viewshed analysis to screen potential development projects across from Mt. Vernon, and an interactive mapping portal that is centralizing datasets from across the Chesapeake Bay watershed to inform and support collaboration by regional conservation partners. The session will result in a white paper on best practices from across the watershed.