
© The Nature Conservancy
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The Nature Conservancy of Washington is currently working on the Willamette Valley-Puget Trough-Georgia Basin ecoregion to identify marine and terrestrial areas that capture viable examples of native species and habitats. Ecoregional planning entails selecting sites from among a larger set of planning units within this ecoregion spanning Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. This collection of planning units, termed the "conservation portfolio," provides a systematic basis for site planning and acquisition. Integrating and synthesizing the marine and terrestrial environments into The Nature Conservancy's ecoregional planning process presents many challenges and opportunities. Traditionally the organization has focused on biodiversity on land, but the shoreline and marine components make up a significant amount of the overall biodiversity of the region. Using an algorithm program called SITES, we hope to merge both marine and terrestrial data sets and use them together to set conservation goals and create a cost or suitability index. This process of gathering critical habitat information at multiple scales across varying landscapes has helped us construct a framework for prioritizing both land and water sites. From its topographic highlands to bathymetric depths, this ecoregional plan is attempting to accurately capture our conservation mission: to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. The central feature used in the map is an integrated hypsometry-bathymetry data set in development by the University of Washington. They have obtained all 10-meter USGS DEMs from Puget Sound to the Pacific and determined the difference between the hypsometeric datum and the bathymetric datum in order to construct a "surface" of elevation difference. From there they constructed a bathymetric surface and corrected this surface to the terrestrial datum, merging the two datasets.
| Author: |
Zach Ferdana
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| Geographic Extent: |
Ecoregional
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| GIS Applications: |
Ecoregional planning
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