SUMMARY

The Columbia Land Trust is based in Vancouver, Washington and works to conserve the best remaining natural habitat and scenic vistas on and around the Columbia River. Over the past year, it has developed an extensive conservation planning process, including new data and new GIS techniques that can help other land trusts with similar efforts.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

The aim of the conservation planning effort has been to synthesize existing data and studies from throughout the region in a way that staff might more confidently prioritize potential projects and build partnership support. With better data coupled with accessible tools, future acquisition and protection efforts by the land trust will have more strategic impacts on protecting the most important habitats in this dramatic landscape.

THE STORY

The Columbia Land Trust covers an enormous and diverse geography. The land trust's service area stretches from the mouth of the Columbia River over the Cascade Mountains and into the arid Columbia Plateau, encompassing 26 counties and 153 cities and towns.  More than 90 rare and threatened animal species call the region home, as do multiple salmon and steelhead species listed to the Endangered Species Act.

Since January 2005 CLT has been working with CommEn Space to update its conservation plan by analyzing patterns of biodiversity, the location of rare, threatened, and endangered species, habitat types, and wild salmon populations. This process will result in a set of prioritized watersheds that will help to guide CLT's conservation activities for the next five years.

In addition to the conservation prioritization work, CommEn Space has developed a comprehensive catalog of spatial data that the land trust uses in all of its day-to-day operations. Data sets include land cover for three different time periods, parcels, land ownership and management status, species distributions, wetlands, and many many others. CLT staff access data, create maps and review project opportunities through customized ArcGIS files as well as a web-based mapping application called Calico, developed by CommEn Space and hosted remotely to provide staff and volunteers in satellite offices access to the same data.

Much work has been done to assess critical habitats at varying scales, to prioritize key ecological systems, and to measure habitat features. By tapping existing research, the land trust is saving costs and cultivating partnerships with other organizations with common conservation interests. The volume of available data and research did not entirely replace the need for new analyses that synthesized these resources in a consistent approach over the complete service area. 

To manage the significant data and to cover the list of critical habitats and systems of interest to CLT, CommEn Space developed three models to prioritize areas at multiple geographic scales for salmon, general biodiversity and threat.

Preliminary results were vetted through workshops with local scientific experts in several communities throughout the service area. As changes to data and methods were implemented, revised results were once again circulated to partners and other researchers active in the service area in an effort to arrive at results that might be useable for other organizations.

LESSONS LEARNED

Land trusts with limited scientific research capacity can gain valuable access to quantitative data that can guide their work without altering the culture of their organization. But the assembly of existing studies and data does not in itself reveal clear direction. Considerable effort must be made to isolate meaningful information, to identify distinctions among places and opportunities and to find ways for staff, volunteers and board members with varying familiarity with maps and data to use these tools.

CONTACTS

Ian Sinks, Stewardship Director, isinks@columbialandtrust.org
Cherie Kearney, Conservation Director, ckearney@columbialandtrust.org