Conservation planning and management under accelerated sea level rise can be complicated by the numerous data sets available and the many needs, sometimes conflicting, that policymakers need to accommodate. Warren Pinnacle Consulting, Inc. with funding from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has created a decision-support tool to assist policymakers in planning and prioritizing coastal marsh areas for adaptation and conservation. This tool accounts for environmental and socio-economic factors, protection of developed areas, and projections generated using the Sea-level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM) along with their inherent uncertainty. A key feature of the tool is that stakeholders set the values that guide it. Stakeholders define the ranking and values of various wetland ecosystem services (qualitative and quantitative). These values are integrated with SLAMM predictions and applied to the parcels of currently existing and predicted future marsh lands. This presentation will focus on the development and an example application of the tool.
Webinar co-sponsored by the EBM Tools Network (co-coordinated by NatureServe and OpenChannels.org) and MEAM.