Desert Conservation Priorities Mapping Tool

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Authors

Butt, Courtney J.

Issue Date

2024

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Thesis

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en_US

Keywords

Conservation , Decision Support System , Decision Support Tool , DRECP , GIS , Mapping Tool

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Abstract

Development of public land use within the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) boundary is taking place through collaboration of the California Energy Commission (CEC), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (USBLM) in order to 1) identify areas of land with high-quality renewable energy potential and 2) provide for the long-term conservation and management of endangered and threatened species as well as areas of biological, physical, cultural and social importance. The DRECP covers 22,585,000 acres of southern California, encompassing the Mojave and Colorado Deserts. Home to threatened, endangered and protected (TEP) species, endemic lineages and evolutionary hotspots, the desert biota face widespread threats (e.g. human development, subsidized predation, linear corridors, off-highway vehicles, military training, invasive plants, climate change, and renewable energy). Privately owned land existing within the DRECP provides potential opportunities for private environmental organizations to expand on federal and state landscape-scale conservation efforts. I will be showcasing a spatially explicit decision support system (DSS) that was built to help a private environmental organization identify parcels to target for land acquisition, conservation, and restoration. Differing from others in its versatility and its weighting scheme, this DSS works under differing conservation scenarios (e.g. conservation vs restoration) and includes nonlinear weighting of criterion (attribute) values, providing more flexibility to the decision maker when assigning weights to evaluation criteria.

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