| Abstract: |
There are over 100,000 acres of protected land in Rhode Island with nearly 300 different owners ranging from federal agencies to local land trusts. Most of these conservation land owners, especially the land trusts, have few resources or technical knowledge to monitor and steward their properties. Most stakeholders within RI recognize that stewardship is necessary to ensure the long-term ecological viability of their properties, but have little technical wherewithal to assess stewardship needs. The Conservation Landscape Context Toolbox is a geospatial analysis tool that was developed in order to support the needs of these stakeholders. It contains three indices constructed from Modelbuilder models that measure potential threats to protected properties at a landscape scale. A landscape is defined as the area surrounding (by a distance that the user specifies) an individual conservation parcel. Our core indices measure the proportion of individual land uses, amount of neighboring conservation lands, and road density in the vicinity of individual parcels. The toolbox has been used to quantify the landscape context of Rhode Island’s conservation lands and the results of these analyses will be reviewed in this presentation. |