Vista is conservation planning support tool operating as an extension to ArcView 9.1, 9.2, and planned 9.3 spring 2009. It also requires the Spatial Analyst extension. It supports planning for a variety of impact assessment and conservation or "green infrastructure" applications by incorporating distribution and conservation knowledge about those features a community wishes to conserve. Vista is especially well-adapted to biodiversity conservation, but allows you to incorporate other features such as scenic views, historic sites, prime farmland, hazardous areas, etc. It can also be used as a more general land use or management-planning tool by incorporating competing uses that must be balanced and has also been demonstrated to work well with CommunityViz. Vista provides various functions for analyses and exploration, impact assessment, and mitigation planning. Basic functions include: producing indices of conservation value across planning regions that can be explored or used for quick views of where the important areas are; importing scenarios of land use for evaluation against your stated conservation objectives (scenarios can include any number of land use or management policies as well as existing land use, infrastructure, growth models, wildfire models, etc; and tools for creating mitigation plans or interoperating with popular conservation optimization tools such as MARXAN and SPOT. We have demonstrated interoperability with NOAA's N-SPECT software to accomodate aquatic assessment and planning and plan to release an integrated version in spring 2009. Vista 1.x and 2.x series are offered as a free download complete with extensive integrated help manuals. Technical support, training, and consulting are available as contracted services.
Anyone can be taught to run the analyses. To format data for input, basic GIS skills are required. Discipline experts are required to provide defensible knowledge to the database.
Live technical support, complete manual, group or custom training available
Desktop computerArcGIS (ArcView) 9.1, 9.2, and planned 9.3 with spatial analyst
Vista can support robust databases typical of sophisticated GIS projects. The two primary types of data inputs are:1. Conservation element information (distribution maps and attributes, expert knowledge such as minimum viable areas).2. Scenarios: maps of land use and policy attributes that you wish to evaluate against conservation goals. As with any project it is critical to match the data precision to the question being asked. Data exists globally to apply Vista for basic coarse scale planning
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