Achieving the right balance between the natural and built environment requires strategic and holistic planning. The NOAA Coastal Services Center helps its partners and customers accomplish this by building diverse partnerships, providing data and spatial technology, bringing a regional perspective to conservation efforts, and delivering relevant training.
The Center partners with various governmental sectors and nonprofits to achieve conservation goals. Check out “what we do” for examples of the organization’s more recent efforts.
Benthic Habitat Data
Benthic habitat data provide information on the types of aquatic habitats present in an area and their extent, spatial distribution, and character. This information is essential for establishing conservation areas, developing management strategies, assessing estuary health, managing shellfish harvesting, and identifying resources at risk from various natural and anthropogenic stressors such as dredging and nonpoint runoff.
High-Resolution Elevation Data
Elevation is a primary data consideration for management activities in the coastal zone, including conservation. Elevation data at high resolutions and accuracies, whether for land or seafloor surfaces, can be particularly useful for delineating land uses or habitats, especially transition zones, and understanding where water will move in the event of inundation. This information can then be examined in relation to other factors and potential stressors across the landscape and seascape, illuminating critical areas that may need to be protected or conserved.
Land Cover Data
Land cover maps depict where and how much of a region is covered by forests, wetlands, development, and other natural and man-made features. Comparing maps from different years is a good way to document changes and alert communities to emerging trends, information that is useful when predicting impacts caused by changes and assessing their cumulative effects.
Coastal Applications Using ArcGIS
Identifying and understanding coastal conservation issues is facilitated using GIS technology. Conservation planning often involves analysis of population growth and habitat vulnerability and the identification of protected areas. A fundamental understanding of how GIS technology is applied to coastal issues can enhance coastal conservation planning efforts.
Coastal Community Planning and Development
Recognizing typical patterns of growth and understanding alternatives to coastal development are critical first steps in coastal land use planning. This course provides coastal planners and other participants with the background, examples, and strategies to foster more sustainable development in their own coastal communities.
Coastal Inundation Training
Land conservation is a method of mitigating storm and flood impacts. Identifying areas susceptible to flood inundation will help conservation planners and floodplain managers prioritize conservation efforts. This course teaches participants about the different types of coastal inundation, ways to map flood areas in the coastal environment, data and methodology limitations, and practical ways to apply this information to support state and local planning efforts.
Conservation Data Documentation
Data can be an expensive component of a conservation-planning project. To help get the most utility out of data, it is important to document how the data were developed and their intended uses. The Conservation Data Documentation and Metadata workshop provides conservation practitioners with the information and tools needed to document their spatial data in the geographic information system (GIS) environment.
GIS Tools for Strategic Conservation Planning
The green infrastructure approach brings together diverse community members to balance environmental and economic goals. Green infrastructure is a designed network of natural areas that benefits nature and people. GIS technology offers one of the best ways to assimilate data and information into a plan of action that works best for a community.
Negotiating for Coastal Resources
This training teaches basic negotiation skills, invaluable for enhancing coastal resource conservation. Students apply and practice principled negotiation skills using coastal management and land use case studies.
Needs Assessment Training
Conservation requires the right skills and tools to get the job done. This on-line training helps capacity-building organizations clearly identify the needs of their target audiences through surveys and other mechanisms. Understanding audience needs is the critical first step in designing and delivering new products and services.
Project Design and Evaluation
Establishing clear goals and developing helpful evaluation tools are important yet often overlooked pieces of any conservation program or initiative. This course will help conservation-minded organizations design more-effective conservation projects and programs using instructional design theory and tools.
Public Issues and Conflict Management
Conserving land in coastal areas can be a hotly debated and confrontational pursuit. This course will equip conservation professionals with the ability to design, conduct, and manage meetings and other collaborative efforts in public forums.
Remote Sensing for Spatial Analysts
Conservation planning and green infrastructure design require an understanding of landscape context and spatial relationships. Determining these relationships often takes place in a GIS environment. The Center’s Remote Sensing for Spatial Analysts course builds the technical capacity of GIS practitioners to develop land cover information, characterize local topography, identify sensitive habitats from remotely sensed imagery, and incorporate the imagery into their GIS analysis processes.
Coastal Conservation In Action
The Digital Coast on-line resource provides examples, geographically displayed, in which data and tools have been applied to conservation issues.
Coastal Conservation Networking Website
This on-line resource provides information and networking opportunities to advance communication and collaboration among coastal conservation groups. The site showcases on-the-ground examples of successful collaborations and also highlights networking venues, funding opportunities, software, trainings, methods, and other resources applicable to conservation.
Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS)
CMECS is an ecosystem-oriented, science-based approach for the standard identification, inventorying, and description of coastal and marine habitats and biodiversity, which can be used for intertidal and subtidal benthic zones, the pelagic water column, and large geological structures located within estuarine, coastal, and open ocean systems. With the ability to classify and assess coastal and marine habitats in a consistent manner, managers will become more knowledgeable of habitat status and make better prioritization and conservation decisions.
Introduction to Stakeholder Participation
Some of the most challenging decisions in coastal conservation stem from the relationship between people and the environment. The Center provides technical assistance to coastal conservation professionals addressing complex human-based problems. The Introduction to Stakeholder Participation guide was developed to provide information about the use of social science tools and can be used to incorporate social issues into conservation efforts.
Literature Review of the U.S. Northeast Coastal Community: Management of Coastal Ecosystems and Natural Hazards
This literature review focuses on needs in the Northeast region that are associated with ecosystem-based management and resilience to coastal hazards. The review serves as a foundational component of a greater needs assessment effort within the region. The needs assessment will confirm priority regional needs and will outline the services and types of expertise available from the Center and other NOAA programs and offices.
