Strategic Conservation Assessment Tool Hub a transferable framework for conservation prioritization and visualization
Abstract
Land conservation decisions are generally made in the context of complex ecological and socioeconomic considerations, yet are often not informed by robust and spatially-explicit scientific data. Moreover, these decisions are often made under a variety of stakeholder priorities which need to be considered as a framework to evaluate potential areas of interest for conservation. In our previous research, we developed a suite of strategic conservation assessment (SCA) tools for the US Gulf of Mexico coastal region that allowed for weighted prioritization and visualization of optimum areas for land conservation. These tools incorporated over two dozen ecological and economic data measures derived from openly available geographic information system and remote sensing data and used multi-criteria decision analysis optimization algorithms to evaluate and visualize potential project areas. Here we demonstrate a proposed transferable framework for prioritization and visualization tools called SCA Hub that can be used to support conservation decision making in any geographical region in the world. The SCA Hub, an open source geospatial web framework, contains modules of base code for the conservation prioritization and visualization tools, and geoprocessing workflows for computing data measures as back-end processes. Conservation decision makers will primarily interact with the front-end of the Hub where users will be able to select pre-processed, and curated data measures most desired by the stakeholders and group data measures under different conservation goals. The Hub will provide the base structure to which any user may extend this tool to other conservation decision making problems by adding new workflows and source data. The front-end user-interface will be linked to a cloud data system that allows for automated geospatial data processing to source data into a hexagonal data framework. With the initial groundwork laid, users will ultimately be able to interact directly with the Hub, import and group data layers, and select tool workflows based on their own programmatic objectives.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMSY12A..12S