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

Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace web site features the Conservation Registry in a full-page article by Alice Kenny. Check out why people are calling the Conservation Registry the “Wikipedia for the Environment.”

Go to the article.
Go to Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace site.

Gina LaRocco is in Sacramento on March 2nd presenting the Registry at the California Land Trust Conference along with co-presenter Larry Orman from the GreenInfo Network.

The session is called Putting Easements on the Map. Topics include development of inventories of protected areas data, and the pros and cons of making easement boundaries available to agencies and organizations doing land use and conservation planning. Participants will learn about national efforts to create GIS inventories of all protected lands, including GreenInfo Network’s California Protected Areas Database, and the web portal being developed for the Conservation Registry.

If you plan to be at the conference, drop by to learn about these new technologies and strategies.

Still on the road….Sara Vickerman and Gina LaRocco will offer a Registry demo and discuss the proposed habitat/biodiversity metric and calculator on March 3rd in Sacramento. Busy week! E-mail Kassandra for the informational flyer.

The Next Generation of Ecosystem Market Tools

by Doug Parsons, Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission

Defenders of Wildlife has been a leader in developing effective and innovative ecosystem service tools, as their recent work attests. Defenders can also take the lead in identifying the next generation of ecosystem service market tools–those which can quantify the value of ecosystem services by adaptation in the face of climate change.

In Florida, the greatest threat from climate change is likely to be sea level rise. Currently, we can look at existing habitats and quantify their economic value in regard to their ability to maintain clean water or clean air, but what value, if any, do they have in a changing climate? A particularly healthy ecosystem might have had X value in regards to how it provided clean water, but can we find additional value for this same land based on its adaptation functions? For example, if maintaining healthy and resilient terrestrial systems helps with northern species migration that is expected to occur with higher temperatures, do these lands now have new economic values based on these new climate response functions? In 2004, mangrove systems famously played a role in mitigating the impact of the tsunami in Southeast Asia. These same systems in Florida could help play a role in mitigating the impacts of sea level rise. Can we put a dollar value on this ‘adaptation value’? I think we can. Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission is considering funding a State Wildlife Grant project to look at how people value ecosystem services in respect to sea level rise. We hope these kinds of projects will help set the stage for developing new economic tools that will provide financial incentives to landowners to help maintain resilient ecosystems in the face of climate change.

I’m optimistic we can develop more sophisticated ways to define ecosystem services, including valuing adaptation functions, which in turn could be powerful tools in preserving natural systems. Although this is new territory for all of us, investing in adaptation today will be cheaper than trying to restore or maintain healthy ecosystems decades from now. We already invest billions of dollars in programs like the Conservation Reserve Program, why not create an Adaptation Reserve Program? In the coming years, carbon markets offer a huge opportunity for adaptation funding. The emphasis on carbon mitigation will hopefully shift, at least partly, toward adaptation funding. Governments and businesses will recognize that a certain amount of warming is going to occur, so now is the time to identify new sources of adaptation funding.

Registry staff had a sneak peek at the all new My Registry–redesigned to allow users to work together on Registry projects. These tools, free to all, will give organizations or groups the ability to grant access to their Registry data to multiple users. Currently, users can only edit and update the projects that they have created.

One organization, many users:
An organizational administrator can invite others to edit and update the organization’s projects, create and share project templates, collaborate with other users and share other My Registry features.

One user, several organizations:
A Registry user will now be able to create projects and assign them to different organizations. This feature will also be used to improve the way projects are assigned to organizational portals.

Project Templates:
A new feature, Project Templates, will make it possible for users to create, save and share project entry information, making new projects easier to add than ever.

Who will use these tools?
Organizations as small as a local land trust with minimal staff to agencies with many employees and many projects will find these tools useful.

When?
These features are currently in development and testing. Registry staff and the hard-working guys at The Other Firm hope to unveil the all new My Registry very soon. Stay tuned!