Abstract

A virtual repository of GeoDesigned Recovery Actions for Species Recovery
Track: Geodesign
Authors: Philip Murphy, Catherine Darst, Nathan Strout

For the desert tortoise, a federally listed species whose habitat ranges over four states, recovery actions to date have been sporadic, disjointed and in terms of species recovery, ineffective. Meanwhile when entrepreneurs look to locate projects on high quality habitat, they require large suites of recovery actions to meet regulatory offset requirements. Management agencies struggle to design such large suites with mixed results. We demonstrate a spatial decision support system for the desert tortoise that estimates changes in stresses in the desert tortoise population for both proposed Solar Energy projects and proposed recovery actions. We demonstrate a second geodesign system that cross-jurisdictional regional teams will use in 2012 to design spatially explicit recovery actions, creating a virtual repository of recovery actions. Solar project proposals can be matched to recovery action suites to create a more coherent set of species recovery actions, and more efficient management of energy project proposals.