The PFLCC has recently completed a set of comprehensive conservation planning scenarios for the state of Florida. This represents the first statewide effort to assess likely alternative futures for conservation considering an array of financial, biological, climatological and urbanistic conditions. These spatially explicit and temporal scenarios simulate both urban growth and climate change and identify the most suitable areas for conservation given the resulting land use pattern. Conservation allocations are based on both fee-title and conservation easements.The conservation priorities and mechanisms expressed in these scenarios are based on a wide set of contributing factors, and simulated conservation is purposefully limited to projected budgets. Therefore, while the scenarios are optimized relative to broad conservation goals, it is not yet known how they perform relative to specific conservation issues of statewide importance. As an important step in the PFLCC’s broader process of developing quantitative priority resource objectives, we propose to characterize species, habitats and strategic habitat conservation areas most at risk in these scenarios.The proposed methodology includes three major steps which have been found to be effective in previous scenario analyses with State LCC partners. The first is expert review and refinement of existing wildlife habitat relationship (WHR) models and associated maps. The second is a spatiotemporal impact assessment based on spatial buffering and overlay of scenario-predicted land use or land cover changes. The third is expert review of current conservation plans for the selected species, and refinement of these relative to expected urbanization and climate change patterns and land tenure.
The calibration data sets are from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2010s. These datasets were used to examine rates and patterns of urban growth through recent decades in order to develop realistic future scenarios based on the past growth.
