Decision Support Tools and Modeling

Isle Royale National Park’s populations of wolves and moose are world renown as the subjects of the world’s longest running predator/prey study. However, inbreeding depression among wolves began to take its toll in the early 2000’s, reducing the wolf population to just a lone pair by 2017. Following a multi-year environmental impact assessment, the National Park Service began re-introducing wolves...

Floodplain forest is a major and critical component of the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS). The current and future condition of floodplain forest on the UMRS is receiving increased attention from managers as the forest appears to be declining and not regenerating. A primary concern is invasive reed canarygrass ( Phalaris arundinacea ), Dutch elm disease ( Ophiostoma ulmi and O. novo-ulmi )...

In this study, we are working with Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore (PIRO, or Park) in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (Figure 1) to produce multiple geospatial layers of Park forest connectivity to reveal the effects of beech bark disease (BBD). There has been a 92% mortality rate of American beech ( Fagus grandifolia) since BBD was first discovered in the Park in 2001. Park biologists are...

This web mapping application is a repository for data and tools that support the Monarch Conservation Science Partnership.

A Decision Support System (DSS) can be defined in many ways. The working definition the Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center (UMESC) uses is, "A spatially based computer application or data that assists a researcher or manager in making decisions ." This is quite a broad definition and it needs to be, as the possibilities for types of DSS are limited only by the user group and the developer...

The ability to predict the distribution of submersed aquatic vegetation in the Upper Mississippi River on the basis of physical or chemical variables is useful to resource managers. Wildlife managers have a keen interest in advanced estimates of food quantity such as American wildcelery (Vallisneria americana) population status to give out more informed advisories to hunters before the fall...

Allows managers and planners to rapidly assess landscape attributes and link these attributes with species/habitat information Provides resource managers a means to compare the conservation potential of local management units with that of the surrounding county, state, or region Can be applied to any taxa or suite of taxa and any landscape, given that spatial data layers representing habitats are...

The Census Stop Tool is a GIS tool that creates random points along a line layer while maintaining a minimum distance between points. The user has the option of selecting one of two random point placement methods. The Census Stop Tool is available as an ArcMap 9.x extension. This tool is designed to facilitate road based surveys by reducing the potential for double sampling.

The Split By Attribute Tool is a customization of ArcMap. The tool takes a single shapefile and splits it into many shapefiles based on the unique values of a chosen field. If the user has made a selection on a shapefile, then only those features that have been selected will be split. Each output layer will named with the following structure: user supplied base name + split value.

The Adjacency For WinBUGS Tool is a customization of ArcMap. The tool iteratively processes each polygon within a selected layer and creates a text file of polygonal adjacency where each polygon is identified by a unique Adj_ID value. The output of this tool is used in WinBUGS (MRC Biostatistics Unit Cambridge) by the car.normal, car.l1, and mv.car conditional autoregressive distributions.

The Percent Edge Tool is a customization of ArcMap that analyzes polygonal shapefiles. The Percent Edge Tool calculates area, compactness, perimeter, edge lengths with adjacent polygons, and percentage of edge with adjacent polygons. This information can then be summarized into a pivot table and queried. Example query: I want to know where are all of the large, compact, woody wetland polygons that...

Where are most important places to direct conservation effort? Such a simple question is not answered simply. There are a myriad of priorities, constraints, and capacities, both scientific and socio-economic, which in combination guide the allocation of management effort. An honest accounting of these priorities, constraints, and capacities is essential for efficient, effective action.