Stakeholder Engagement

The geodatabase was compiled with 22 measures that were developed either directly from existing datasets or by building datasets from the analysis of GIS data. All measures included in the geodatabase were identified from charrettes that the SCA Team held across the Gulf Coast Region (GCR) from March to May 2018 with land conservation stakeholders, which included representatives from various RESTORE member and partner agencies and organizations that engage in conservation actions. In total, 13 charrettes were conducted within the GCR (Austin, Corpus Christi, and Galveston, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; Biloxi, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama; St. Marks and St. Petersburg, Florida) where a total of 176 stakeholders were in attendance.

Throughout the charrettes, a total of 46 priority attributes were proposed by the stakeholders that they felt were important to land conservation in the GCR. Priority attributes were defined as key features that more specifically define conservation goals, and can be quantified through measures. Stakeholders were asked to define priority attributes for land conservation within the framework of the five RESTORE goals (Table 3), and to suggest ways to measure each priority along with relevant sources of data. Stakeholders then ranked each attribute to indicate their priority for land conservation (highest to lowest). In total, a list of 260 tentative measures was developed from stakeholder-identified priority attributes. Suitable data sources for each measure were then located by consultation of experts in geospatial analysis and large-scale conservation planning. For a measure to be included in the database, it had to have Gulf-wide data availability and had to have relevance to land conservation. Following expert consultation and data exploration, the SCA project approved 22 measures for inclusion in the database. Data was then derived for measures from openly available geospatial and non-geospatial data sources (see Support pages for measure data sources).

Each measure was then processed to a 1 km2 hexagonal grid using ArcGIS and the leaflet package within R. A total of seven distinct methods were used to process the data into measures, depending on the data type from the source (i.e., raster or vector) and the type of measure being created (i.e., index, binary, percentage, count, length). For more information regarding data processing, see: Multi-Attribute Ecological and Socioeconomic Geodatabase for the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Region of the United States.