Land in the Chesapeake Bay watershed is a finite and fragile resource, and what happens on land has an enormous impact on local waterways. Population growth and development have increased the need to preserve the special places that we revere as individuals, as communities and as a people for their ecological, cultural, historical and recreational values, and for their role in maintaining and renewing our identity and spirit. Conserving these valuable lands is critical to maintaining the Chesapeake’s heritage and identity, ensuring the quality of our waters and supporting the fish and wildlife for which this region has long been renowned.
The Land Conservation Action Team works on actions that facilitate conservation of landscapes treasured by citizens to maintain water quality and habitat, sustain working forests, farms and maritime communities, and protect lands of cultural, indigenous and community value. To this end, members of the Action Team work together to better coordinate and target conservation efforts, track and report the acres of protected lands throughout the watershed, expand funding, and initiate new strategies for conserving landscapes.
Many different federal, state, local, private, and non-profit organizations have an interest in protecting lands throughout the Chesapeake Bay region, but in the past there has not been a watershed-wide mechanism for leveraging, coordinating, and prioritizing conservation efforts.
The Strategy for Protecting and Restoring the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, issued under President Obama’s Executive Order 13508, called for adapting or developing “a watershed-wide strategic, publicly accessible land conservation geographic information and targeting system to support sound conservation planning and decision-making.” This system was intended to incorporate multiple land conservation values, including those of ecological, cultural, historic, scenic viewshed, recreational, and working importance to the Chesapeake landscape. It would also be used to foster collaborative, strategic land conservation priority setting and implementation, including the leveraging of partner resources and capabilities to achieve mutual land conservation goals.
In 2012, the U.S. Geological Survey and National Park Service, with the support of GIT5’s Land Conservation Action Team, partnered with Nature Serve to develop and build out LandScope Chesapeake based on the goals outlined above. By leveraging an existing interactive platform and map viewer developed by NatureServe that brings together maps, photos, and stories, LandScope Chesapeake will serve as a tool to foster collaborative, strategic land conservation priority setting and implementation, including leveraging partner resources and capabilities to achieve mutual conservation goals. Development partners will continue to work together on this project to build-out the content featured within LandScope Chesapeake, to improve the architecture of the website’s content acquisition systems, and to track land conservation towards the Strategy for Protecting and Restoring the Chesapeake Bay Watershed’s outcome to “protect an additional two million acres of lands throughout the watershed currently identified as high conservation priorities at the federal, state or local level by 2025, including 695,000 acres of forest land of highest value for maintaining water quality.”
