Date and Time: Oct 6, 2015 12 pm Mountain / 11 am Pacific

Presenters: Tom Miewald, USFWS; Sonia Hall, SAH Ecologia LLC; and Madeline Steele, USFWS Co-author: Patrick Crist, NatureServe

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This project builds from a body of work to support conservation planning and design for the Arid Lands Initiative (ALI) in the Columbia Plateau ecoregion. Previous work identified a suite of habitats and species along with their associated viability and stressors, as well as a portfolio of Priority Core Areas (PCAs) and high priority connectivity corridors. This previous work represents a design that, if realized, would improve protection of the current distributions of species, habitats, and connectivity corridors.

This current project describes methods and results for assessing present and future condition of these PCAs. This project can be seen as an intermediate step between the identification of priority areas and the ultimate goal of designing and implementing conservation delivery strategies for the ALI partnership. The outputs of this project are intended to guide decisions for strategy development and implementation.

This project consists of 4 components to provide decision support for implementing landscape scale conservation: The testing of a rapid, field-based approach to assess the current condition of priority conservation areas using an Ecological Integrity Assessment protocol that is adapted for roadside assessment. A spatially explicit climate change vulnerability assessment (CCVA) was conducted for the ALI core priority areas. The primary question the analysis was designed to answer is: are particular priority areas expected to be relatively resilient to climate change in to the future? Development of "scorecards" that summarize elements of connectivity, climate change vulnerability, and current condition for each priority conservation area, and Development of a NatureServe Vista project to support scenario development and future planning needs.