PFLCC's Priority Resources and Conservation Targets

Conservation planning, the process of deciding how to protect, conserve, enhance and(or) minimize loss of natural and cultural resources, is a fundamental process to achieve conservation success in a time of rapid environmental change. In order to achieve success, conservation groups must follow a diagram like the one included in the gallery linked to this guide in order to establish their own conservation values, methods to achieve those values, and ways to measure their own success.

Priority resources are the set of biological, ecological, and cultural features and ecological processes collaboratively identified as the focus of the PFLCC’s planning, science, and measurable objectives. Conservation targets are the measurable expressions of desired resource conditions and are an important tool in biological planning to achieve effective outcomes. Conservation targets provide a focus for planning, design, conservation action, and collaborative monitoring of environmental trends to guide landscape-scale conservation to improve the quality and quantity of key ecological and cultural resources. It is essential to have an iterative and inclusive method to define these priority resources and conservation targets that is replicable and allows for the evaluation of the effectiveness of conservation targets over time.

PFLCC developed a list of Priority Resources (PRs) in 2015. By the end of 2016, PFLCC had an extensive list of cooperatively-developed Conservation Targets for nine of the twelve PRs that are currently under investigation. Blueprint v. 1.0 was published in early 2017, delineating nine of the twelve PRs and partially depicting an additional PR (Estuarine). PRs include:

High Pine and Scrub, Pine Flatwoods and Dry Prairie, Freshwater Forested Wetlands, Hardwood Forested Uplands, Coastal Uplands, Freshwater non-forested Wetlands, Estuarine (partially shown),Freshwater Aquatic, Landscape Connectivity, and Working Lands (1 and 2). Marine and Cultural and Socio-economic PRs are not shown.

These data (which are mostly derived from the Cooperative Land Cover Map, or CLC v. 3.2) can also be visualized spatially in this Conservation Planning Atlas (CPA). The dataset is included in this guide. A full report on these priority resources and conservation targets can be found within the gallery linked to this guide.

Cover image provided by the USFWS.