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Category: Project

Description: This spatial decision support system supports the allocation of land to three different objectives on a landscape. The specific application of this prototype is a a novel approach for mitigating effects of climate change on biodiversity (Aplet and McKinley, 2017). They suggest that wild federal lands be allocated to one of three strategic management zones: (1) Innovation Zone, (2) Restoration Zone, and (3) Observation Zone. Given this framework, a whole host of social and ecological questions arise about where these zones should occur. The SDSS prototype uses an optimization algorithm to address these questions and help public-private partnerships draft such a three zone portfolio. The prototype is slated for open-access release upon publication and is built with the goals of expandability, extensibility, transferability, scalability and maintainability. Its breadth presents challenges to fully realizing all of these goals, but it can apply to other three-zone allocation mixes such as (1) alternative energy development, (2) agricultural preservation and (3) nature conservation areas. The geoprocessing engine uses modelbuilder and python tools in ArcGIS. Example tools used include advancements to Linkage Mapper, a connectivity modeling system, a new habitat representation algorithm, and a "greedy heuristic" module to pursuing optimality.