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.
V2 2009-2010
The second iteration of the SDS, completed in 2010, improved the calculation ability of the system to the point where it can make broad estimates of the increase in stresses due to specific increases in threats. The RI team was able to use the improved system to perform a proof of concept calculation for the
BLM that estimates the increase in threat-based stresses due to the proposed siting of a utility scale solar facility in the Mojave desert.
Key New Features
• A conceptual model manager (CMM) was introduced to manage definitions and relations ships between entities
• The conceptual model was expanded to include all demographic change factors to population change
• Threat –threat, and threat stress relationships were built from ground up
• The strengths of relationships estimated from online surveys of experts, and stored in the CMM
• The SDS engine executed dynamically against the information in the CMM
Graphical Ontology Browser
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