Smart Conservation Green Plan

The SmartConservation Green Plan uses complex geographic calculations to prioritize lands for conservation based on conservation hubs and the corridors that connect them.

Client: Natural Lands Trust

Challenge: As the largest conservation trust in the region, Natural Lands Trust (NLT) is critically interested in the accelerated fragmentation and loss of wildlife habitat. NLT wished to develop a ‘green infrastructure plan’ that would form a blueprint for land conservation and acquisition by land trusts as well as local and state government agencies. Developing this bold plan required an innovative set of tools that enabled the generation of a land network of hubs and corridors for the region.

Solution: Avencia worked with NLT to develop a methodology whereby a hub identification model is paired with a set of software tools to generate corridor plans based on existing development patterns, barriers to animal movement, remaining open land, species diversity, land cover, and other features. Millions of calculations were performed using an innovative ‘permeability’ map that assists with identifying the optimal paths for corridors as well as the degree of flexibility available for any given location in the region.

Outcomes: In 2004 Avencia ran the Green Plan process across multiple, distributed computers for more than a week to generate the first version of the plan resulting in corridor and hub networks at three different landscape scales. The methodology was enhanced in 2005 to leverage new data sets and enable the scoring of each output corridor and hub. The resulting plans are being used by NLT planning staff to work with townships and counties in order to identify and prioritize land acquisition and protection efforts.