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Note: Session titles beginning with an asterisk (*) have student presenters.
AUTHORS: Amy Knight, Dan Hipes – Florida Natural Areas Inventory
ABSTRACT: Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI) and Florida Forest Service partnered to design and implement a rapid assessment methodology for the Longleaf Pine Ecosystem Geodatabase, a central repository for data on the distribution and condition of Longleaf Pine Ecosystems (LPE) in Florida. The field assessment of ecological condition included measures of canopy, midstory and ground cover that could be crosswalked to maintenance condition classes described by America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative. The protocol was designed with metrics that could be discerned from a roadside to facilitate rapid data collection. In 2013 Florida county foresters used the first iteration of the protocol to assess 1.8 million acres of longleaf in Florida, primarily on private lands and the results have been used to inform longleaf restoration planning in the state. More recently NatureServe (NS), USFWS, and other partners have developed rapid assessment metrics for open pine systems throughout the southeast. In our current phase of data collection for Florida we revised our field assessment to be more aligned with the Southern Open Pine (SOP) protocol, to help meet the objective for a more consistent, vetted rangewide methodology. FNAI and NS are field testing the effectiveness of the SOP ecological indicators for wildlife and are collaborating with Environmental Defense Fund and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to explore the potential of SOP metrics to inform a Longleaf Habitat Quantification Tool.
Tuesday October 31, 2017 9:00am - 9:15am EDT
McCreary