This project is part of a larger effort to design a sustainable landscape for wildlife and ecological systems in the Columbia Plateau ecoregion. Another goal of this effort is to test and describe different approaches to doing “Landscape Conservation Design” (LCD) and working towards articulating a toolkit of approaches for LCD. This report documents a task related to further develop and testing of this toolkit as applied to priority areas in the Columbia Plateau). This project focuses on a rapid assessment method of several potential areas across a large landscape.
This assessment project builds from these previous ALI efforts (ALI 2013 and ALI 2014) by providing decision support for strategy development. This project was developed to help address the knowledge deficit that satellite or aerial information does not provide accurate information about key metrics of condition, particularly information related to abundance of native vs. non-native species and structural metrics of habitat. The general question for this project is: can a field-based approach be developed that allows for both standardized assessment of condition and a rapid, comprehensive evaluation of relatively large areas. The project concentrates on Priority Areas delineated by USFWS for the Arid Land Initiative (ALI) (ALI 2013) (Figure 1). The objectives of the assessments are to:
- Develop and test a rapid-field assessment protocol to assess the condition of landscape scale conservation priorities.
- Synthesize Ecological Integrity Assessment (EIA) data to determine the overall ecological integrity of conservation targets within a subset of priority areas.
- Develop a monitoring protocol for the conservation partners in the region based upon the EIA This report documents the methods and results for two of those activities: (1) development and testing of a rapid-field protocol and (2) assessment of ecological integrity of conservation targets in priority areas.
