PREFACE

Purpose of this Document

This document is a Technical Design Document for the Strategic Conservation Assessment (SCA) suite of tools. It provides guidance and template material which is intended to assist the relevant management or technical staff, whether client or supplier, in producing a project specific Technical Design Document. It is also useful background reading for anyone involved in developing or monitoring strategic science-based conservation tools.

Use of this Document

The Conservation Planning Inventory Tool (CIT) is built from data that were compiled via internet searches and from expert sources; however, this list may not be exhaustive. We took every effort to include the majority of projects in the SCA region and verified the inventory with the help of stakeholders by providing an avenue to report missing plans and correct errors. The SCA Team will not take responsibility if some plans are not included in the inventory.

The Conservation Prioritization Tool (CPT) is not intended to be prescriptive. Instead this tool was designed to provide data to support conservation planning efforts across the Gulf Coast Region.

All users should acknowledge that the CPT model is intended to support land conservation planning. The flexibility of this tool enables a user to evaluate conservation alternatives using either a multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) framework, or user-defined values.

The Conservation Visualization Tool (CVT) is built on the same data measures used on CPT and hence this tool is also not intended to be prescriptive. Instead this tool was designed to provide data to support conservation planning efforts across the Gulf Coast Region.

All users should acknowledge that the CVT is intended to support land conservation planning. The flexibility of this tool enables a user to explore the SCA database and weight different priorities to understand the potential areas of conservation.