National and Regional Conservation Planning
A larger-scale component of the Outreach Program is to transfer knowledge gleaned from quality research at Tall Timbers and the larger Red Hills region to regional and national planning efforts. Here our intent is to provide direct input into broad-scale conservation planning efforts to promote wise use of natural resources and to foster Exemplary Land Stewardship. To effectively accomplish this our knowledge of land management and ecosystem services must be put into the appropriate spatial and temporal context and often varies with each project. Therefore, it is often necessary for us to take part in regional or national planning efforts such as being involved in working groups to ensure management information is accurately applied. Below are some examples of national and regional projects we are collaborating with others on.
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The National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative (NBCI)
Tall Timbers Research Station was tasked with revising the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative (NBCI), a range-wide plan for recovering bobwhite and grassland songbirds. Drs. Bill Palmer and Theron Terhune completed this revision with its official launch in March 2011. The plan involved hosting 22 individual state workshops and 1 multi-state workshop for a total of 25 states and more than 600 biologists informing a geospatial system and database with their expert knowledge of the landscape and its relative opportunity for restoration to prime bobwhite habitat.
The end products are a web-based written document and a web mapping application identifying the likelihood for quail restoration by identifying both the major land use opportunities for and impediments to habitat management.
Golden-winged Warbler Conservation (GWWA) Action Plan
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The action plan outlines goals, the strategy, and actions needed for the effective conservation of the Golden-winged Warbler on the breeding grounds under the Golden-winged Warbler Conservation Initiative. A focus of the action plan is based on a habitat approach. The initiation of the plan started with a collaborative research project involving eight study areas in seven states across the breeding range of the USA with the intent being to better understand the Golden-winged Warbler's breeding ecology, habitat associations, genetic introgression profile, and associated bird communities. The project is a cooperative project with the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University and the University of Tennessee as well as numerous other federal and state organizations.
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The LANDFIRE, also known as the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Project, Project is a five-year, multi-partner project producing consistent and comprehensive maps and data describing vegetation, wildland fuel, and fire regimes across the United States. It is a shared project between the wildland fire management programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and U.S. Department of the Interior. The project has four components: the LANDFIRE Prototype, LANDFIRE Rapid Assessment, LANDFIRE National, and Training/Technology Transfer. Tall Timbers' GIS specialist, Joe Noble, is working on the project with the USFS to address issues with LANDFIRE data specific to the Southeast. Regional Planning & Working Groups Outreach staff is currently serving on various regional working groups. Regional planning and working groups typically consist of a small subset of folks from various organizations partnering to work toward a common goal or task. Two examples are the Geomatics working group and the Grassland Bird Working Group.
The Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks LCC (GCPOLCC), Geomatics working group is a geospatial community of practice for identifying the resources, capabilities, and capacity to respond to the needs and requirements specifically tied to the GCPOLCC. This working group was launched in April 2011 and its focus is on creating and coalescing geospatial products to better serve the larger natural resource community for improved sharing of spatial data.
The East Gulf Coastal Plain Joint Venture, Grassland Bird Working Group is currently focusing on using a structured-decision making approach to identify and restore habitat in the East Gulf Coastal Plains region to benefit grassland songbirds, particularly regionally declining species such as the Northern Bobwhite, Loggerhead Shrike and Eastern Meadowlark to name a few.