Integrating Biosystem Management Prioritisation into Data Systems
Any structural or spatial level or scale of biodiversity as a resource can be defined as a biosystem. The biosystems that are the most common focus of biodiversity management effort are habitats and species. Habitat and species assessment and ranking systems are useful for prioritisation of biodiversity management efforts, particularly when they are integrated into assessment and monitoring data systems.
This practice area is maintained by James Lambie. Discuss integrating biodiversity management prioritisation into data systems.
Checklists
Level One: biosystem management prioritisation is done using the data that was collected with no prioritisation approach in mind.
Level Two: Data supports biosystem management prioritisation using a standard process.
- follow a published biosystem management prioritisation process, using data that is collected through a standardised field assessment process
Level Three: Data supports investigation of the provenance of the data.
- data is tagged with a degree of certainty about its quality and currency
Level Four: Biodata system automatically calculates ecological management priority.
Level Five: Biodata system integrated with a decision-support system for biosystem management.
- DSS determines biosystem management priority balancing ecological, financial, planning and regulatory factors
Additional Tools
These additional GIS plug-ins function as decision support tools and may prove useful in both prioritising work and interpreting biodata:
CorridorDesigner - an ArcToolbox GIS tool to create habitat corridor models and evaluate various options
MARXAN - This tool is one of the most widely used conservation planning tools world-wide. It provides decision support to a range of conservation planning problems, including: the design of new reserve systems, reporting on the performance of existing reserve systems, developing multiple-use zoning plans for natural resource management.
C-Plan - Another conservation planning tool that is used in conjunction with MARXAN.
MAXent - A useful conservation planning tool because it improves our understanding of species/habitat relationships in space and time, predicts patterns of biodiversity, identifies areas of conservation significance, and helps to identify suitable areas for reintroducing species. This software takes as input a set of layers or environmental variables (such as elevation, precipitation, etc.), as well as a set of georeferenced occurrence locations, and produces a model of the range of the given species.
Reference Resources
Environment Waikato, Horizons, Environment Bay of Plenty, the Department of Conservation and Landcare Research have developed prioritisation practices. Auckland Council is in the process of developing a prioritisation practice and publishing it in its biodiversity strategy.
A summary of a work session on integrating prioritisation at the 2010 National Workshop is available to view.
Join the discussion on Integrating Biosystem Management Prioritisation into Data Systems.
Environment Waikato Progresses Biodiversity Prioritisation Project
Environment Waikato (EW) has been investigating options for biodiversity prioritisation since the early 2000s but the project has been slow to get off the ground. During 2008, however, the project is starting to come to fruition and EW aims to map, inventory, score and prioritise where possible all Significant Natural Areas (SNA) for most of the ecosystem types within its region over the next few years.
The task is massive, especially for indigenous terrestrial ecosystems and also because the scale of data capture means SNA, or 'Sites' as they are commonly called, may be as small as around 0.5ha. EW approaches the task one district at a time (there are 12 in total in the Waikato Region) and given the SNA work already being undertaken by some districts, EW makes sure to work with these councils where possible to avoid duplicating work.
The system being used has no name but is commonly referred to as the Biodiversity Prioritisation project. It begins as a desktop GIS excercise where qualified ecologists spatially inventory any indigeneous terrestrial vegetation, sand dunes or palustrine wetlands that may potentially be locally, regionally, nationally or internationally significant using 11 criteria as defined in appendix 3 of EW's regional policy statement. All sites that are at least regionally significant are then to be further evaluated by the ecologists and scored and ranked using criteria still under development here at EW. Again it is a hugely time consuming task given the level of detail and therefore the work is being done one district at a time. The data is documented in metadata and reports and ultimately will be stored in Oracle Spatial.
EW is also aware of DoC's Biodiversity Information Management System and NHMS databases and intends to work more closely with relevant conservancies to reduce the overlap here where possible. There are still some issues to address, but it is expected that data comprising proposed sites for a couple of districts will be complete within a few months and subsequent data to become available as resourcing allows.
Here is the presentation on Environment Waikato's prioritisation work given at the 2009 Dataversity National workshop by Yanbin Deng and Ryan Clark of the Environment Waikato Biodiversity project team.
Contact
For more information contact Derek Phyn or Yanbin Deng.
Auckland Council Biodiversity Prioritisation Project
Five objectives have been (or will be) set around the following areas:
- species
- ecosystems
- projects with community groups
- ecosystem services
- survey and monitoring
A decision support tool that was developed by Liana Joseph, Richard Maloeney, and Hugh Possingham called a "Project Prioritisation Protocol" will be used to achieve the species objective. A different decision support tool might be more suitable to prioritise work to achieve the ecosystem objective. Work to achieve the other objectives may not use a tool at all and may rely on expert opinion to come up with the priority order.
This prioritisation will help the council to meet its Biodiversity Strategy and Biodiversity Workplan and various groups within the council will be using the tool:
- Natural Environmental Management team
- Research, Investigation and Monitoring Unit
- Coastal, Land, Air and Water
- Parks
- Biosecurity
- Environmental Programmes and Partnerships
- Stormwater
For more information contact Rosalie Richards
Log in and Edit this Page. You can view the edit history without logging in.
This site is provided by OnlineGroups.Net, where you can start your own free groups site, and powered by GroupServer, the open source web-based mailing list manager.