Southeast Conservation Planning Atlas: Leveraging Web Technology for a Spatial World

Development of conservation strategies at landscape scales is often hampered by a lack of data consistency and compatibility across jurisdictional boundaries (both political and organizational). The sheer volume of new geospatial data and tools that is being produced also threatens to overwhelm individual users that cannot keep current on all these developments. The fallback position is reliance on the familiar, which reduces efficiency, hampers strategic conservation, and makes useful information go unused. Also, too few individuals involved in conservation delivery either have access to or know how to operate a GIS. To address these deficiencies, the Southeastern Landscape Conservation Cooperatives developed a Conservation Planning Atlas (CPA) in 2012. The CPA is an online mapping environment built upon the Conservation Biology Institute’s Data Basin platform. The core of Data Basin is free and provides familiar mapping tools to easily create custom maps, group workspaces for collaboration, a search engine to discover new datasets, and the ability to upload or download various geospatial datasets. Use of the CPA in a study of managing changes to hydrologic flow in the south-central United States will be reviewed.