Since 2007, the Redlands Institute has been working with the USFWS Desert Tortoise Recovery Office (DTRO) to create a threats-based spatial decision support system to help the DTRO coordinate species recovery activities such as research, monitoring and management actions. At its core the system uses spatial characterizations of existing threats combined with a weighted threat-stress conceptual model to estimate changes in stresses for tortoise populations due to specific recovery actions.
V1 2007-2008
The first iteration of the SDS supported the DTRO in developing the Draft Revised Recovery Plan for the Mojave Population of the Desert Tortoise (2008).
The system was composed of a hard wired ArcGIS model builder scripts. Relationships – how threats contributed to threats, and threats to mortality, were based on published threat-threat relationships. These relationships between threats, stresses and recovery actions were hard-wired in the calculational scripts. The strengths of relationships were inferred from preexisting threat-threat surveys completed by desert tortoise scientists.
Inputs: Threat Maps
Outputs: Stress Maps
Main Features
• Spatial Representation of Threats and Stresses
• A-Spatial Calculation of Recovery Action rankings
• No end user GUI
Graphical Ontology Browser
- Click on a node to jump to the content of that node
- Pan to see the rest of the graph
- Scroll the mousewheel up and down to zoom in and out
- Rearrange the nodes in the graph by dragging a node to a different position