Designing an Information Supply Chain to Support Landscape Scale, Systems Level, Conservation

Decisions seeking to get the right conservation actions to the right places at the right time are at the core of all conservation. These decisions require the integration of relevant data and knowledge as one is useless without the other. Integration of relevant data and knowledge is easy for problems that are simple and small in scope, but such problems are rare in the world today. Over the past century the complexity of the conservation decision-making environment has increased significantly across scale, time, and factors considered as conservationists have embraced the concepts of ecosystem and adaptive management. Unfortunately, to deal with this increasing complexity the conservation community has largely focused on generating more and more data and knowledge, leading to ever increasing fragmentation of information, rather than the effective integration and delivery of information. We believe that ecosystem and adaptive management serve as good business principles to guide strategic habitat conservation, but we lack effective business operations to support and carry out these principles. We argue that the conservation community must start thinking and functioning like a conservation enterprise with much more emphasis on developing managing an information supply chain to meet the demands of strategic habitat conservation decision making. This will require a new age of research and equitable attention to the a) development, b) management, c) integration, and d) delivery of the raw materials (data and knowledge) and component parts (models and decision tools) to decision makers.

To begin addressing this need, The Nature Conservancy and U.S. Geological Survey, working with a broad network of scientists, natural resource professionals, agency staff, and non-profit colleagues, are in the process of designing and developing a shared Great Lakes information management and delivery system to help support the mission of the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes (UMGL) Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC). The goal of our project is to develop demonstration projects that provide a foundation for a shared, web-based, Great Lakes information management and delivery system to support strategic habitat conservation.  This presentation will discuss the need for an information supply chain to support landscape scale conservation and the specific objectives and tasks of Great Lakes project.