Work Plan for the Wildlife Component

Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) National Assessment

NatureServe Missouri pilot

NatureServe is a national organization affiliated with a network of state natural heritage programs.  In cooperation with USDA and Missouri state partners, NatureServe is conducting a pilot project in Missouri to develop and evaluate methods for assessing benefits of conservation practices on wildlife habitat improvement.  This project integrates and leverages work already initiated with Missouri Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and funded by the Environmental Defense Center for Conservation Incentives.  The key objective is to demonstrate processes that can both evaluate the benefits of previously installed conservation practices as well as help prioritize Farm Bill program allocations.  Both objectives of USDA require models that link biological element (e.g., wildlife habitat) compatibility with conservation practices such that application of practices can be predicted to have beneficial, neutral, or negative effects.  Methods to evaluate benefits should be the same as those used to prioritize future investments to make the decision making process defensible and amenable to monitoring of intended effects.  However, spatial and tabular data sets used in this type of analysis vary across states, and limit the types of analyses that can be conducted nationally.  This project uses the state of Missouri as a pilot and is intended to assess the ability to measure conservation benefits given different types of data.

Overlays of multiple data layers (e.g., NatureServe species occurrence data) are being used to correlate known conservation practices (from digitized applied practices in Missouri) with wildlife habitat and species occurrence.  Levels of uncer­tainty associated with the spatial precision of component data sets will be documented.  Currency and relative completeness of relevant information on conservation practices, species occurrence, and conservation status of species, and the relative quality/viability of species occurrences and wildlife habitat will also be documented.  The outcome of this pilot effort will provide recommendations for extending this study to a national level.  Outcome measures from this study will focus on how conservation practices contribute to habitat potential of rare and at-risk species.

These documents require Adobe Acrobat.
CEAP Science Note: Using NatureServe Information to Assess Conservation Practice Effects on At-Risk Species, June 2007 (0.2 MB)
Using NatureServe Information to Assess Farm Bill Practice Effects on At-risk Species and Habitats, Missouri Pilot Final Report, February 2007 (3.2 MB)

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