Peter
August, Duane Chapman, Susan Baxter, and Alyson McCann,
Department
of Natural Resources Science
University
of Rhode Island
Kingston, RI
02881
The
major institutional players in land conservation in Rhode Island are The Nature
Conservancy, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Audubon Society, and the RI
Department of Environmental Management. There
has, however, been an rapid growth in the number of small, local conservation
organizations, such as Land Trusts and conservation commissions, that are
becoming effective agents in purchasing land for open space.
The Rhode Island land conservation community is fortunate in having
access to many sources of funds that are dedicated to purchasing land and these
include state and local bonds, private Foundations, oil spill settlement funds,
and monies specifically targeted for groundwater and wetlands protection.
State, federal, and local conservationists are now in the position of
having to decide which lands are most valuable for natural resource protection.
Many
of the small municipal-based conservation organizations do not have ready access
to the scientific data they need to objectively evaluate conservation value of
potential properties they might acquire. Furthermore, they do not have the technical or ecological
background to identify critical regions for protection.
We have been working for four years in developing a simple analytical
protocol that provide local conservation organizations guidance in identifying
the most important lands for conservation.
Our model is based on the premise that single-theme conservation
prioritizing -- for example groundwater, wetland, biodiversity, or cultural
resource criteria -- is good and appropriate for many conservation applications
and transactions. However, all
things being equal, any property that contain multiple resources has more value
than properties that only contain a single resource.
Therefore, areas in the community where we have high co-occurrence of
natural and cultural resources are critically important targets for protection
because they represent the most (economic) value for the conservation dollar.
The
purpose of this project is to develop a statewide inventory of critical data for
land conservation prioritization and conduct our co-occurrence analyses for the
communities in mainland Washington County, Rhode Island (plus West Greenwich):
Scope of Work
The
methods we will use in this project are as follows:
Phase
1 of Project:
1) Consolidate all the
critical data for the analysis into a single, seamless GIS workspace and conduct
the spatial modeling required for the assessment.
Our data inventory is given in Table 1. The fundamental steps and
timeline involved in the analysis are:
a)
Consolidate
statewide data in vector format
b)
Convert data
to 30 m cell size raster representation
c)
Create Theme
composites (see Table 1) from the constituent gridded datasets
d)
Mask out
freshwater and saltwater bodies, already protected lands, and areas outside of
RI
e)
Sum the
composites and filter the result with a 3-cell average moving window (i.e.,
reclassify every pixel by taking the mean value of all pixels within a 3 cell
radius)
f)
Extract town
subsets of the data and prepare the package of deliverables. This will consist of four (4) sets of the following laminated
maps (at 1:24,000 scale):
·
a plot of
the digital orthophoto of the community,
·
plots of
each resource theme (4 maps) and constituent data,
·
the
composite plot for the community,
·
a plot of
soil constraints to development,
·
a plot of
the USGS Digital Raster Graphics dataset (DRG),
·
a map of the
critical lands composite for all of southern Rhode Island,
·
a mylar grid
reference plot.
Phase 2 of Project
1) Assist the project
facilitator to convene a meeting of each of the nine communities to review the
package of maps and analyses to identify two staff weeks time equivalent of data
revision or analysis that might be done to enhance the planning maps.
2) Spend two weeks per
community enhancing their GIS data as per #1 above.
3) Recreate the two sets of
updated maps for each of the communities as detailed in Phase 1, step 1f
(above).
4) Create 3 duplicate CD's of
gif images of all maps for DEM use.
5) Create world wide web
representations of all critical resource maps.
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Table 1. Resource
Themes and Constituent RIGIS Data Used in the Critical Lands Analysis
Farmland
Resources
Agricultural lands (1995 LULC dataset)
Prime and Important soils (SSURGO data)
Cultural,
Recreational, and Aesthetic
Resources
Scenic Inventory (DEM)
Historical Regions (1998 RIGIS version)
Greenway Corridors (RIGIS, DOP)
Biodiversity
Resources
Wetlands (1995 RIGIS LULC)
Land within 100m wetlands, rivers/streams, estuaries, shore
Forests (1995 RIGIS LULC)
Lands within 100m already protected land (TNC dataset)
DEM heritage dataset on critical/unique habitats
Groundwater
Resources
Aquifers (RIGIS, DEM)
Aquifer Recharge Areas (RIGIS, DEM)
Wellhead Protection Areas (RIGIS, DEM)
Protected
Lands
DEM Management Areas (RIGIS)
Audubon Land (TNC, RIGIS)
Nature Conservancy Land (TNC)
Land Trust Properties (TNC)
Federal Refuges (RIGIS)