Planning and priority setting involve looking at landscapes to rank acquisition opportunities as well as to assess much broader threats and opportunities

PRIORITY SETTING

Here are three approaches to priority planning, from simplest to most complex:

1.  Expert reviews:  The simplest approach is to use several knowledgeable people to review maps of an area, marking places they agree are good opportunities for a land trust to focus its efforts and documenting their reasons.  This information can then be mapped by hand or by GIS, to show the geographic arrangement of the key opportunities.

2.  Basic Parcel Ranking:  A more advanced approach is to acquire or create tax parcel boundaries and to rank landowners’ holdings. This work can also bring in natural resource and other factors, whether calculated by using GIS tools (e.g., find all parcels with significant forest cover within 200 yards of a stream), and/or by qualitative assessments from knowledgeable persons. In essence, the parcel list is a spreadsheet that has ranking columns for a number of factors, and possibly a column for overall desirability. The rankings can be done simply or they can be done with great rigor. The result of this is a map of your area, showing each parcel's rank, plus a database that can be used to further assess landowners and their holdings.

3.  Conservation Plan:  The most effective approach is to prepare a full conservation plan. While this can be fairly expensive ($10-50,000+), it can give a land trust major advantages with landowners, public agencies, funders and others, as well as helping to focus the internal operations and resources of the land trust around key goals and acquisition targets. Conservation plans not only involve more analysis but also usually require involvement by many stakeholders, and are usually prepared with the help of an expert consultant. LEARN MORE about conservation planning...

REGIONAL ASSESSMENTS

Regional assessments are overall evaluations of an area - instead of looking for individual properties, they focus on more general patterns. A common approach is to create a threats map, showing where lands are at risk of future development. This can be done by showing master plans or zoning, or it can be done by creating a special GIS layer that ranks lands as to their risk and then displays that on a published map.  LEARN MORE about threats mapping from Greenbelt Alliance...

A more involved regional assessment might use GIS to study the linkage of natural resource values to certain growth factors.  For example, the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests has conducted an analysis of the conversion of forest lands due to population growth in the state. This project looked at population growth factors and forest structure, related them to parcel sizes and landowner characteristics, and showed the impact of and alternatives to the growth trends.

MORE INFO: 

Biodiversity Partners - A rich set of articles and links from Defenders of Wildlife on conservation planning

NatureServe - an excellent repository of articles, data and services for conservation planning

Decision Support Tools  - PlaceMatters.org has extensive information on growth modeling approaches in their Tools Database

ESRI Virtual Campus – Offers an online conservation GIS course