The Conservation Registry welcomes the state of Arkansas to the list of  states who have established portals in the Registry. Viewers can visit Arkansas’s portal by going to the State Portal pull-down menu on the Registry home page, or by linking directly to the Arkansas portal.

Arkansas Conservation Activities
Get a look at some of the conservation activities happening in Arkansas by visiting the detail page for Restoring Blackland Prairie and Oak Hickory Woodland at Terre Noire Natural Area. This project is a partnership between the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, The Nature Conservancy, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

And check back often to see what’s happening in Arkansas!

Ready to Use and Available Nationally

Dutcher's Cove, Pierce County, Washington

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Pacific Region (Region 1) released a portal on the Conservation Registry which tracks and maps the Section 6 Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund land acquisition projects in the Region 1 states of Hawaii, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, and National Coastal Wetlands projects as a pilot in Washington. A feature of the portal is to highlight the accomplishments of partners in each project. View portal here.

The Cooperative Endangered Species Fund is part of Section 6 of the Endangered Species Act, which makes grants to U.S. states and territories who are undertaking voluntary projects to protect candidate, threatened and endangered species. These awards include conservation grants, recovery land acquisitions and habitat conservation plans. Read about this program here. The National Coastal Wetlands Project grants are used to acquire and restore coastal wetlands and adjacent uplands for the conservation of fish, wildlife and their habitat. Read more.

“We chose to use the Registry to track and map our National Coastal Wetlands Project grants and Section 6 land acquisition grants as a pilot project for these nationwide programs because the Registry is ready to use and available nationally,” said Joanne Stellini, biologist with the USFWS in Washington state, who is heading up the use of the Conservation Registry for the Pacific region. “Our Registry portal allows us and our state agency partners to showcase our accomplishments and keep the public up to date on conservation where they live.”

USFWS project polygons (purple) in context with other Registry projects.

The Conservation Registry is a preferred tracking and visualization tool for federal and state agencies and organizations with portals because of the Registry’s ease of use and ability to present project locations and data in context with other efforts being undertaken in the region. It also presents partnership information so users can see how private, state and federal dollars are working together to preserve and protect out treasured natural resources.

View Lily Point Acquisition project: See what almost a dozen partner organizations and agencies can do when they work together in Washington state.

Zumwalt Prairie: In one of the most delicate prairie habitats, USFWS and The Nature Conservancy are working together to preserve habitats for the federally threatened Spalding’s catchfly plant and Snake River steelhead.

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 Pacific Coast Joint Venture now has a portal in the Conservation Registry. The portal is poised to become the primary tool for geospatial tracking of Pacific Coast Joint Venture partners’ accomplishments, while helping them coordinate with others to implement on-the-ground projects.

The Pacific Coast Joint Venture develops partnerships to protect and restore lowland wetland and upland ecosystems for the benefit birds and other wildlife. The joint venture works in the coastal areas of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Northern California and Hawaii. The PCJV is one of 18 habitat joint ventures in North America working to carry out the goals of four major bird conservation initiatives.

Registry portals are designed to give organizations the ability to visualize their projects in a larger context and to tailor the Registry’s features to their own needs. The Pacific Coast Joint Venture needed a portal that could integrate its information-rich web site with the portal’s mapping capabilities, while enabling partners to access, update and visualize their projects electronically.

View the portal here. Check out the Pacific Coast Joint Venture’s web site here.

Bruce Taylor, director of Oregon Habitat Joint Venture, received the 2009 Excellence in Conservation Award from the Natural Resource Conservation Service for his fine work with Defenders of Wildlife, the Oregon Habitat Joint Venture, and many partners. He was honored in a ceremony in the rotunda of the Oregon State Capitol on Monday, November 2, 2009. The NRCS Excellence in Conservation Award is the highest award the agency gives to honor those outside the federal government for their work in conservation. The Conservation Registry is very proud to have Bruce as a partner.

Learn more about the Oregon Habitat Joint Venture. Visit our partner site, Pacific Coast Joint Venture.