Providing for residential growth, fostering economic development, and protecting natural resources requires a delicate balance between the built and nonbuilt environment. A variety of factors come into play, including land values, the abundance of natural resources, real estate market trends, demographics, local ordinances, and community character.
Location:
St. Mary's Georgia, USA, St. Mary's (Camden County), GA
The primary aim of the project was, and is, to assist emergency managers, planners, the public, and others in their efforts to reduce hazard vulnerabilities through awareness and education, hazard mitigation, and comprehensive land-use and development planning.
This project uses Collaborative Learning (Daniels and Walker, 2001) and land use planning tools (EBM Network, 2006) to connect the practice of ecosystem management to municipal land use decision-making.
Florida Antural Areas Inventory (FNAI) has conducted a statewide analysis of natural resource conservation priorities for the Florida Forever program. The Inventory created or compiled GIS data layers for rare species habitat, natural communities, ecological greenways, large landscapes, significant surface waters, natural floodplain, functional wetlands, aquifer recharge, coastal resources, cultural resources, recreation, and sustainable forestry.
South Africa is currently proclaiming a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of its sub-Antarctic Prince Edward Islands. The objectives of the MPA are to: 1) contribute to a national and global representative system of MPAs 2) serve as a scientific reference point to inform future management 3) contribute to the recovery of the Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) 4) reduce the bird bycatch of the toothfish fishery, particularly of albatrosses and petrels.
Location:
sub-Antarctic Prince Edward Islands, South Africa,
Traditional methods of creating marine cost layers have included mapping current use by surveys of fishing activities. This includes either mapping catch per unit effort of one industry such as Stewart et al (2003) with rock lobster or mapping current fleet use such as Richardson et al (2006).
We know that our coastal communities are vulnerable to hazards such as hurricanes, storm surge and flooding. In the future, climate change may make impacts from these hazards even worse.
The Marine Team of the Natural Capital Project began a 2-year program to develop a suite of spatially-explicit ecosystem service models- the marine InVEST tool, and to apply the tool to a specific policy question in the British Columbia or California coastal marine ecosystem.
A growing awareness of the decline in ecosystem health and the depletion of resources world-wide has led researchers to explore the use of ecosystem-based management (EBM), an approach that integrates ecological, social, and economic goals, and explicitly recognizes humans as key components within an ecosystem.
The Elkhorn Slough Tidal Wetland Project is a collaborative effort to develop and implement strategies to conserve and restore estuarine habitats in the Elkhorn Slough watershed.
Linking natural hazard risk assessment and community planning using a framework called Pathways-DM, which integrates CommunityViz, HAZUS-MH, and LUPM as well as other tools.
Officials in the Town of Falmouth, Massachusetts, were concerned about the aesthetic and natural-resource impacts of an increasing number of docks on Green Pond. They wanted a tool that would allow them to illustrate dock and pier build-out under the existing regulations.