Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

Precision Conservation: Using New Technologies to Identify Landscape and Parcel Scale Conservation and Restoration Priorities

Chesapeake Conservancy

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

Who are we?

Ian Plant

• We conserve and protect the

region’s treasured landscapes and

waterways, connecting people to its

natural, cultural and historic

resources.

• We develop and use the latest

technologies to identify the places

most worthy of conservation and

restoration.

• We work with local communities,

governments, landowners and other

conservation groups to accomplish

mutually shared goals.

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

Green

Blue

Red

NIR

NDVI

DEM

nDSM

The Need for Precision Conservation

We are using remote

sensing and GIS

modeling to generate

new data that allow us

to identify priorities for

conservation and

restoration at the

parcel-scale

• High-resolution Land

Cover Classification

• Concentrated Flow

Path Analysis

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

Developing new tools & resources to enable crowd sourcing of data & help partners better understand what land to protect & restore

Indicator Species Assessments

Interactive Web-mapping

Precision Conservation

Water Quality Monitoring

University Participation

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

• Help incorporate

high resolution data

into conservation

and restoration

targeting

– Identify Hotspots

– Target outreach and

education

– Direct project funding

to where it will have

the greatest impact

– Design BMPs based

on the landscape

Enabling/Enhancing Crowd Sourced Data/Applications:

Uses for Precision Conservation Tools

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

www.chesapeakeconservancy.org

High Resolution Landscape Data

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

Pennock 2003

• Most models assume consistent

flow off a landscape

• Our D-Infinity analysis identifies

how water actually flows across

the land and where it accumulates

• Determines how much water is

flowing from “upstream” into

each pixel to determine optimal

buffer placement and size

Concentrated Flow Path Mapping

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

• Help incorporate

high resolution data

into conservation

and restoration

targeting

– Identify Hotspots

– Target outreach and

education

– Direct project funding

to where it will have

the greatest impact

– Design BMPs based

on the landscape

Uses for Precision Conservation Tools

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

Example Applications

Ian Plant

Chester River – working with Chester River Association to identify high quality landscapes for conservation easements; willing landowner restoration sites; and comparing 22 years of water quality data to assess upstream landscape conditions and water quality impacts Prince Georges County - working to address TMDL goals with their Dept. of Environment to find where investments from the County’s Public/Private Partnership Urban Retrofit (Stormwater) Model could maximize water quality and also provide public health benefits Baltimore City - working with Greater Baltimore Wilderness Initiative using urban tree canopy and land cover data throughout Baltimore City to identify where opportunities exist to transform abandoned lots into public greenspace and fill access gaps Susquehanna River - using its high resolution land cover data and LiDAR Digital Surface Models to identify highly visible natural landscapes that are critical to the visitor experience along the Captain John Smith Trail.

Saving the Chesapeake’s Great Rivers and Special Places

Emerging Opportunities/Problems

Ian Plant

• A surge of stream water quality monitoring using cell phone sensors & low cost micro-controller arrays at fixed points (e.g. stormwater outfalls) will drive responsive behaviors

• The increase in water quality data collected and transmitted by volunteers via cell phone apps will help us visualize dynamic, system-wide conditions

• We will need backbone organizations and partnerships to manage this data and visualize the real time status of stream water quality but funding will be a problem.

• Additional data will enhance monitoring and reporting of potential water quality

violations but local governments may lack the resources to respond and enforce changes

• Flow path and hot spot targeting efforts can optimize BMP placement and lower the cost of remediating non-point source pollution, but institutional adoption of such tools will lag

• Developing water quality monitoring protocols for nutrient trading of non-point source

BMPs (to enhance assurances they are performing effectively will be slow to materialize