description:
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Determining the location and extent of protected habitats is the first step in developing conservation plans for the Great Lakes and prioritizing additional habitat for protection. All current Great Lakes habitat management plans include protection goals. However, there is no comprehensive database that can display and analyze habitats that are currently protected within the Great Lakes. A comprehensive GIS database of protected lands in the Great Lakes will be utilized by conservation organizations for conservation planning, public accountability and project collaboration. This layer will enable organizations to work more efficiently and collaborate with other organizations that could potentially leverage additional funding from a variety of sources including, but not limited to: GLFWRA, GLRI, NAWCA, FWS GLCP, and private foundations. DU and TPL have been developing protected lands layers (both fee and easement) for over 10 years through the development of a Conservation and Recreation Lands (CARL), Conservation Almanac, and National Conservation Easement Database. Through this project, we have added an additional 13,680 protected lands to the database and corrected numerous attribute and spatial errors. While the actual acreage of protected land decreased by 217,173 acres, this was due mostly to mistakes in the early version of CARL by including federal lands that were identified as acquisition areas, but were not actually protected. In addition to the CARL layer developed for this project, two additional projects were benefited. Easement data collected as part of this project was also included in the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED, www.conservationeasement.us) and the Conservation Almanac (TPL, http://www.conservationalmanac.org). |