By Meg Kenagy
Oregon Conservation Strategy Communications coordinator
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife

How does the conservation project you are working on fit into your watershed? Who’s fighting invasive species, providing fish passage or trying to bring back beaver in your area? Is anyone else in the state surveying for frogs? Find out here on the Oregon Conservation Registry portal. And, while you’re looking around, think about what project you could add to the website.

The Conservation Registry is free and easy to use. An online database and mapping system, the Registry allows you to enter, search and map your conservation projects. It’s based on Google Maps, which makes it easy to use and provides a familiar platform.

“It only takes about 10 minutes to get an overview of the site and see how it works,” said Kassandra Kelly, Defenders of Wildlife content manager for the Oregon section of the Registry. “It takes about 30 to 45 minutes to enter a project. The software is form-based and data entry goes very quickly if you have the information at hand.”

Today, there are more than 12,000 projects in the Oregon portal of the Registry—a good start but no where near enough. For example, in a search for “frogs,” only two projects were returned. For the website to be successful, a lot more people who are involved with habitat and species conservation will need to contribute.

There are many benefits to participating in the Registry—you can look at your project in the context of other projects, see the progress being made over time in a specific area, find projects in your area of interest and learn out how projects similar to yours are being funded.

By way of example, look at the Yaquina River Beaver Habitat Rehabilitation project. A Google map pinpoints the restoration area, project goals include invasive species removal and riparian replanting designed to attract beaver back to the area for the good of coho salmon. Partners and funding are included. The Conservation Registry is truly easy to use. Unlike many websites that offer geographic maps, no GIS specific knowledge or software is needed. The Registry was launched in 2009 to capture the work being done in support of the Oregon Conservation Strategy and other state’s wildlife action plans.

The Conservation Registry is managed by Defenders of Wildlife with the support of many federal, state and local agencies, foundations and non-profit organizations. Visit the Oregon Portal of the Conservation Registry.

Read On the Ground: The Oregon Conservation Strategy at Work, newsletter of ODFW’s Wildlife Division.

Take a Look at Oregon: The Conservation Registry publishes new dataset.

Partners from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board and the Conservation Registry published 9,872 projects from the Oregon Watershed Restoration Inventory database on the Conservation Registry in April. View data by going to the Oregon portal to browse by map or by clicking here.

The Oregon Watershed Restoration Inventory is the single largest database of restoration projects in the western United States. It is managed by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (OWEB), a state agency that provides grants to help Oregonians take care of local streams, rivers and wetlands. The addition of this dataset contributes to an overall view of conservation in Oregon.

Crosswalking data
The Oregon Watershed Restoration Inventory data fields were matched–or crosswalked–to fields the Registry captures and displays. Because the Registry supports a broader view of conservation work, there was some data in the Oregon Watershed Restoration Inventory that the Registry did not incorporate.

By choosing to focus on conservation across the landscape, the Conservation Registry provides a user-friendly format where it is possible to visualize the broadest extent of Oregon’s investments in habitat and wildlife.

“The Registry requires less detail, while we capture a lot of treatment information,” said Bobbi Riggers, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board’s Monitoring Data Coordinator. Users interested in viewing a full representation of all the collected data can download an Access file from the Oregon Explorer, home of the Oregon Spatial Data Library.

“The goal is to make the data available to the public in a user-friendly format,” says Renee Davis-Born, Ecosystem Services Coordinator for OWEB.  “The Conservation Registry is a nice compliment to what OWEB has released on the Explorer site. The Registry displays collaborative projects and other restoration activities which are not visualized on Explorer. It gives a broader view and shows acquisitions and educational components.”

Ideal Users?
“Ideal users of this data on the Registry are project collaborators, partners and the interested public, people who may not be resource professionals but who want to know what’s going on in the neighborhood and watershed, and possibly support the effort, get involved, or simply find better understanding,” says Ms. Davis-Born. “The Registry has a chance to reach those people.”

“It’s especially useful for projects with multiple partners, so that all collaborators can see their contributions to the work,” says Ms. Riggers. “The Registry’s visualization is particularly good for a national audience, because the Registry’s broadly-defined data standards are not specific to one agency.”

Beyond Restoration
The Registry has always worked collaboratively with partners, including other developing databases, by filling a niche between ease of use for the interested public and the more demanding requirements of conservation professionals.

“This data import gives everyone a much better sense about the range of conservation-related activities occurring in Oregon. Best of all, it shows what priorities are being met and where new investments need to be made,” says Sara Vickerman, Senior Director of Biodiversity Partnerships for Defenders of Wildlife and main force behind the creation of the Registry. “There is still a lot of work to be done.”

Our favorite places to visit:
Deschutes area: many highly collaborative projects.
Oregon’s North Coast: major investments in watersheds and habitat.
Southeastern Oregon: because it’s beautiful.

Check out:
Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board
Oregon Watershed Restoration Inventory
Oregon Explorer

The Oregon Wildlife Institute has recently completed a publication called, “Wildlife Conservation in the Willamette Valley’s Remnant Prairie and Oak Habitats”.  The report offers management recommendations for several species of concern in grassland and oak habitats. The publication is intended for land managers and conservationists planning habitat restoration projects and other efforts to benefit Willamette Valley wildlife.

Get the report and species accounts here: http://www.oregonwildlife.org/Publish/synthesis_intro.htm

If you’ve never heard the story of the Bandon, Oregon fire of 1936, please check out this new blog from the Oregon Invasive Species Council. Dan Hilburn tells the story of an invasive species that nearly destroyed a town. One more reason to just say no to alien invaders.

Mapping, Conservation, and K-12 Education
by Jim Proctor

In Douglas County, educators are using the Conservation Registry in conjunction with the Oregon Explorer Natural Resource Digital Library to connect online resources with field-based learning activities so students can experience how natural resource information is collected, shared, and applied to on-the-ground management.

The program, called Oregon Explorers (like the digital library) is a K-12 initiative funded by the Gray Family Fund and coordinated by Alder Creek Children’s Forest.

One of the initiative’s first projects is the Alder Creek Riparian Restoration and Interpretive Trail. Located on the Alder Creek Children’s Forest site one mile west of Canyonville in southern Douglas County, Alder Creek is a small, summer-dry creek that empties into Jordan Creek and the South Umpqua River north of Canyonville. Like many tributaries of the South Umpqua it has been affected by a variety of land uses, from timber production to ranching to rural settlement and commercial development.

Maintenance and restoration of adequate instream and riparian habitat in small tributaries such as Alder Creek will cumulatively improve flow and habitat characteristics of the entire South Umpqua basin.

The Alder Creek project will be undertaken by middle school youth from Days Creek School, near Canyonville. With funding from the Oregon Explorers initiative and Cascade Community Credit Union, students will construct a short interpretive trail on both sides of Alder Creek and mark and identify vegetation near the trail.

They will then learn how to remove exotics such as Himalayan blackberry and transplant native vegetative cover in the riparian area, as well as assess the quality of instream habitat (e.g., existence of downed woody debris). Students will prepare text for interpretive signage along the trail to describe native species, significant riparian and instream habitat, and the restoration work they did, and help install signage along the trail. Finally, using GPS devices students will mark the course of the trail and major landmarks for upload into Google Earth. This file and associated pictures and reports will be shared with other students participating in the Oregon Explorers project via an online teaching and collaborative community web site called Moodle. Project data and public documents will be linked to the Conservation Registry record.

As mapping is a great way for K-12 students to learn about and share knowledge related to conservation, the Conservation Registry and the Oregon Explorer digital library will be used for gathering natural resource information. The Conservation Registry’s data entry capacity will provide the means for users to share projects, describe actions and update progress. In addition to map-based interfaces, Oregon Explorers will use their Moodle site where teachers and students can share data, resources, and perspectives on their field-based activities.

Oregon Explorers is being developed and tested in Douglas County, but all related curricula and resources are available online to any school in the state of Oregon with the ultimate goal of connecting Oregon’s two greatest treasures—its youth and its natural resource wealth—via the latest field and online technologies. With these tools and methods, young Oregonians will be well prepared for the future, whether as aspiring natural resource professionals, or as informed citizens participating in future natural resource policy decisions.

Check out the Alder Creek Riparian Restoration and Interpretive Trail project in the Registry.

Visit the Alder Creek Children’s Forest web site.

Watch the project take shape on Moodle.