Registration is open!
Please join us for the next installment of the Conservation Lecture Series on Tuesday, April 18th, from 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time. Dr. John Gallo, Senior Scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute will present:
“Prioritizing Postfire Restoration Opportunities by Leveraging the Environmental Evaluation Modeling System and Community Science”
Habitat restoration and the management of invasive species are important strategies for conserving biodiversity, especially in recently burned areas which are especially vulnerable to invasion. To help managers prioritize restoration locations, Conservation Biology Institute, Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and United States Forest Service collaborated to create a new, replicable tool and approach for better combining field data with decision science. Because the data needs for this approach are high, especially in scaling it up to all fires, we experimented with tapping into the vast potential of community scientists (i.e. citizen scientists) and compared the resulting data with those collected by professionals. We then converted the research grade point data into population polygons, and combined with region-wide GIS data in a logic model that includes three criteria branches (sub-models): invasive species, erosion risk, and natural species regeneration capacity. For the invasive species branch, we programmed the Weed Heuristics Invasive Population Prioritization for Eradication Tool (WHIPPET) into an extension of the Environmental Evaluation Modeling System (EEMS), along with some additional, optional criteria, then looped it so it analyzes every species in a single model run and combines their results together. We also evaluated the community science contributions compared to professional expert contributions, and evaluated the decision support system with an expert-opinion based field assessment.
All are welcome to attend! Please register for the Zoom webinar using this link.
Visit the Conservation Lecture Series website for more information, including recordings of past lectures. Hope you can join us!
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