ESM 270 Conservation Planning Assignments
The assignments included on this page are snippets of assignments that I submitted for ESM 270 Conservation Planning. The full assignments also included co-written lab reports from myself and a peer, of which only the summaries are included here. All maps below are my own, created with ArcGIS.
Lab 4 Summary: Jaguars (Panthera onca) of the Talamanca-Osa region of Southern Costa Rica are experiencing habitat fragmentation from human land use. A Circuitscape and Linkage Mapper analysis of least cost paths and land use types in this area show that agricultural pastures and palm plantations are the largest threats to jaguars. Suggested solutions to reduce human-jaguar conflict include buffers and wetlands.
Lab 6 Summary: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used in the conservation field to direct insight from diverse stakeholders to inform conservation plans. AHP is an Excel-based tool in which stakeholders state their preferences for certain criteria by performing pairwise comparisons; all stakeholders’ preferences are accumulated in weighted sums which prioritize certain conservation criteria over others. In this analysis, we assessed how the preferences of four stakeholders would inform which land to protect for conservation of 10 different plant and animal species within the Morro Bay watershed. Our results highlight the need to understand which stakeholders to include and which criteria to evaluate for more representative and informed conservation decisions.
Lab 3 Summary: Understanding which activities pose the most threat to a species in a geographic area can make conservation actions for that species more effective. This is especially important for species with limited ranges and threatened species. This analysis uses the web-based mapping software ArcGIS to map where four different threats intersect the estimated range of the critically endangered black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii). We focused on areas where these threats are most intense in order to determine where in the black abalone’s range each threat is most prevalent and inform conservation actions for this declining species.
