| parts | | type | Technical Summary |
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| value | The goal of the SECAS is to define a “future conservation landscape in the Southeast United States.” The project team is well positioned to develop a forward-looking and responsive framework for SECAS, having a combination of expertise in climate science, ecological science, and natural resource adaptation, as well as strong institutional relationships with key SECAS stakeholders.
This project will frame resource management challenges in the region through the emerging principles and concepts of climate adaptation, and in particular, through assessing the implications of climate change and other drivers of landscape change for existing conservation goals and management objectives. Our work will largely mirror key aspects of the climate-smart conservation process developed by the National Wildlife Federation in collaboration with multiple US federal agencies. First, we will develop a report that reviews and summarizes goals, objectives, and management actions in key federal, state, and local plans as well as other key strategy documents guiding decisions on SE species, priority ecosystems, and landscape-scale systems. Identification and selection of plans will be the result of consultation with project advisors and important SECAS stakeholders, with relevant plans expected to include not only wildlife management and conservation strategies, but also plans from other sectors important for driving landscape-scale changes (e.g., urban growth, bioenergy). Second, we will assess the goals and objectives highlighted in this report with respect to expected climate and land change impacts in the region. This assessment will begin with an overview of expected changes in the SE and potential impacts on regionally-important species and ecosystems, but will be augmented by more focused analyses of impacts on a limited number of key species and priority ecosystems. Third, based on results of the analysis of impacts and implications, we will initiate discussions with state and regional decision makers about how conservation goals and management objectives may need to be reformulated to become more “climate aligned,” and to develop guiding principles and propositions that can be used to incorporate considerations of climate and landscape change into relevant decision processes. This stage of the project will require engagement with a variety of decision-makers and other stakeholders to ensure that the results are of maximum utility and are actionable by SECAS participants. Finally, the report and all documents reviewed together with visualizations of anticipated change will be placed in a section of the SE CSC Global Forum Website for open, one-stop access.
To ensure maximum relevance for supporting the SECAS process, each of the four activities will engage the SE conservation community to gain their insights on both biophysical changes and governance issues and their support for the findings. In addition to working with a project advisory committee, we plan a meeting to introduce the project as well as a mid-project review of the draft report (either as an independent meeting, or in association with the SE conservation summit or other regional meetings). The introductory meeting would begin discussions of actionable principles and propositions and be used to gather input on key analytical issues for inclusion in the formal document text analysis and identify additional focus topics for impact analysis. The formal document analysis will be complemented by interviews with key agency personnel who can offer deeper insights into the document objectives, goals, and priorities. In conducting the document analysis, we will work with state agencies to assure that the review process includes the most current and significant plans (e.g. the revised SWAPs due in October 2015) as well as those specified in the RFP. Interviews will also be used to obtain information about the challenges and opportunities that exist in implementing current or future conservation plans. The coding protocol will draw on insights from Dunlop et al. (2013) and Stein et al. (2014) in identifying general types of conservation goals strategies, scale mismatches, constraints, and limits. A more comprehensive document analysis will be conducted for selected priority species, ecosystems, and landscapes giving a detailed assessment of how the objectives are articulated and their value for decision making (see Gregory et al. 2012). The mid-project meeting will review the draft report and continue dialogue on principles and propositions. The project team will assemble web content and the website development and design will be conducted by CSC staff to assure consistency with the current standards for DOI web products. Following completion of the report, we anticipate seeking additional support to facilitate dissemination and other engagement around the report and the resulting conservation and management principles.
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