It's a hard truth in the coastal resource management business: you can't do it all. When it comes to conservation and restoration, choices have to be made. And those choices are almost always difficult ones, since there are so many things to consider.
The Habitat Priority Planner was developed to make this process a little easier by helping participants understand and prioritize their options. Users can map important landscape features in an area and consider various scenarios, allowing them to better visualize potential impacts. Sample uses include considering where to place conservation boundaries, where to place a road to minimize the impact on natural resources, and where to conserve or restore habitat to provide the greatest benefit for an endangered species. The idea for the tool came from coastal resource managers who were making decisions like these.
"While the tool was developed for habitat restoration projects, we've now found this concept too limiting," says Robert McGuinn of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coastal Services Center, a member of the team that developed the Habitat Priority Planner. "In fact, one of the first groups to use the tool used it to determine what lands they should focus on in their efforts to preserve farmland."
McGuinn says those who have used the tool so far have given it high marks, particularly the following features:
- Ease of use. Someone with basic geographic information system (GIS) skills can quickly master the program.
- The tool isn't data hungry. Land cover from the NOAA Coastal Services Center's Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) is the base data set needed. (These data sets are available free of charge for most coastal areas in the country.) All other data are optional and are dependent on the requirements of the task at hand.
- The interactive nature of the tool. All conservation efforts are collaborative in nature. This tool is used to generate various graphs, reports, and "what if" scenarios on the fly, which is very important when working on an issue through a group or public process.
"There are more complicated tools out there," says McGuinn, "and these are fine when a complicated analysis is required. But when you are sitting in a room with people who have a lot of ideas and need to look at a wide range of possibilities, nothing beats the Habitat Priority Planner."
The Habitat Priority Planner is a new tool from the NOAA Coastal Services Center. As such, the organization is looking for state or local coastal programs interested in working with the tool and the Center to make improvements in the 2009 version. If you are interested in participating, contact Danielle.Bamford@noaa.gov. The tool is available at www.csc.noaa.gov/hpp/.
