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Project Goal
Founded in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society, the Wildlife Conservation
Society is renowned as one of the world’s most effective leaders in saving wildlife. Since its inception WCS has helped establish protected areas and research stations throughout the world and were responsible for many of the first field studies of wildlife species (e.g., mountain gorillas, humpback whales, African elephants, giant pandas). Today, WCS works in 61 countries on 5 continents and supports over 500 conservation projects, and in all these places, it works with local partner institutions, from village councils to national park authorities to develop conservation strategies.
Much of the strength of WCS is centered within its site-based programs, where it works directly to save wildlife and wildlands. To strengthen the site-conservation planning, in 1999 WCS began developing the Landscape Species Approach (LSA), a decision support tool for helping its projects plan their management and research activities. With an initial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the LSA was piloted at three sites in Bolivia, Ecuador, and in Congo. Today, the LSA is administered by the WCS’ Living Landscapes Program and is being used by 12 of WCS long-term projects around the globe.
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Business Problem Solved
Land-use planners and natural resource agencies worldwide are challenged by the competing demands of human development and environmental conservation. Conflicts between these two demands are typically most severe at the landscape scale, creating a strong need for spatially-explicit, scientific approaches to planning. The Landscape Species Approach (LSA) uses the habitat needs of wildlife and the distribution of human activities to guide conservation practices at WCS sites across the world.
LSA encompasses a set of decision-support tools for strategic planning of conservation, from Conceptual Models that help projects construct explicit goals and objectives, to software for selecting focal species, to Monitoring Plans for measuring success. The core of the LSA has been selection of a suite of focal species, called Landscape Species, and spatially-explicit modeling of critical habitat (called Biological Landscapes) and human activities (Human Landscapes). The overlay of these is called the Conservation Landscape, and helps WCS scientists determine where to focus their conservation activities.
Technology Implemented
Wildlife Conservation Society continually strives to acquire and maintain the most advanced computer hardware and analytical software. Current WCS GIS facility includes 10 networked high-end PC computers and a variety of peripherals including media for data transfer and storage, and facilities for large format scanning, digitizing and plotting.
The LSA approach, especially the modeling of habitat quality and threats distribution, relies heavily on the use of ArcView 3.2 and ArcGIS 9.0 software
Development Team Biography
Dr. Amy Vedder, Vice-President and Director, Living Landscapes Program
Dr. Eric W. Sanderson, Associate Director of Landscape Ecology and Geographic
Analysis
Dr. David Wilkie, Associate Director for Strategic Planning
Dr. Karl Didier, Landscape Ecologist
Gosia Bryja, MSc, Landscape Ecologist/GIS Analyst
Dr. Scott Bergen, Remote Sensing Specialist
Jessica Forrest, MSc. Remote Sensing/GIS Analyst
Dr. Caterina D’Agrosa, Seascape Ecologist
Dr. Samantha Strindberg, Quantitative Ecologist
Karen Minkowski, MSc. Range-Wide Priority Setting Specialist
Guy Picton-Phillipps, MSc. Remote Sensing/GIS Analyst
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