Purpose

The Conservation Prioritization Tool (CPT) integrates the priorities and values identified in local and regional plans with those identified by stakeholders representing local and regional agencies and organizations. The SCA Team conducted an inventory and assessment of plans and priorities, creating in that process an online catalog of plans. This priority data was next vetted through a series of Gulf-wide design charrettes, where stakeholders edited, affirmed, and expanded upon priorities. The shared priorities identified through plan review and stakeholder engagement were then used by the SCA Team to construct a tool to prioritize land conservation projects.

The motivation for the CPT is to evaluate different land conservation projects based on its ecological merit with the use of openly available data from state and federal agencies such as USDA, NOAA, etc. Several charrettes were conducted with the stakeholders from the study region to rank the conservation priorities and identify suitable measures that capture the ecological factors. The data measures were then developed with the stakeholder inputs. The prioritization is performed by using stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA), a multicriteria decision analysis method that is capable of handling problems with multiple constraints and insufficient or missing data. SMAA algorithm incorporates priorities of over 100,000 preferences by assigning random weights that are uniformly distributed in the preference space. Data that indicate ecological factors tend to be in different scales (geospatial, non-geospatial) and types (raster/vector/table). For consistency and algorithmic efficiency, each of these data measures are converted into a hexagonal grid format over the entire study region for further analysis.