The purpose of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) is to inform the management of natural and cultural heritage resources in response to shifts in climate, habitat fragmentation and loss, and other landscape level challenges. The South Atlantic LCC’s mission is to “create a shared blueprint for landscape conservation actions that sustain natural and cultural resources” (South Atlantic LCC 2014) and to this end, has contracted with the Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) to release the first version of the Conservation Blueprint using the Data Basin (databasin.org) platform. The South Atlantic LCC seeks to iteratively refine the Conservation Blueprint and release future versions as necessary to achieve their mission. The Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) is committed to improving the functionality offered to partners who have developed Conservation Planning Atlases and other gateways using the Data Basin platform. CBI follows an agile software development process and uses the best available technology to increase the effectiveness and communication of data to better inform land management and conservation practices. CBI has recently begun developing purpose built data visualization tools to complement the existing mapping, data sharing, and collaboration functionality within the Data Basin platform. For example, the AdaptWest Ecoregion Climate Data Explorer (http://adaptwest.databasin.org/app/ecoregion_climate_explorer) allows users to explore relationships between key climate indicators across ecoregions within North America. The South Atlantic LCC wishes to continue working with CBI and revise user interaction and include new content to the Conservation Blueprint and release Version 2.0 by July 2015. CBI is well suited to provide technical support, maintenance, and offer potential recommendations on how to iteratively enhance the Blueprint interface based on user feedback collected by the South Atlantic LCC staff for current and future versions of the Blueprint.
