Mark Endries, Conservation Map Contest
ECP/SCGIS/SCB 2011 Conservation Map Contest HONORABLE MENTION : INNOVATION
Mark Endries, (US Fish & Wildlife Service, NC, with US Fish and Wildlife Service Asheville ES Office Staff)
(See Contest Background information at end) x2011 xCartography xWildlife xEndangered xLandscape xAnalysis xPrioritization
Wildlife faces a myriad of benefits and threats to their well-being. If one considers all of the benefits and threats to wildlife as a system, this system is very complex. A challenge to those responsible for the conservation and preservation of wildlife systems is the ability to efficiently provide information on these systems to those who need it.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Asheville Field Office (AFO) is responsible for reviewing for endangered species compliance all federally authorized, funded, and permitted projects, and implementing listing and recovery activities for federally listed endangered and threatened species and candidate species of concern in Western North Carolina (WNC). Paramount to the ability of the AFO to effectively implement listing and recovery actions, as well as educate constituents on conservation issues in WNC, is a tool to provide conservation information in an effective manner. This tool would permit landscape-scale evaluation of a proposed project to assess its impact on lands important to fish and wildlife species. In an effort to prioritize the work area of the AFO and share this information with AFO constituents, the AFO used geographic information systems (GIS) to develop a work area habitat prioritization map. This map incorporates a wide variety of land use, land cover, and wildlife species data to rank the AFO work area landscape on a 1-10 scale based upon federal trust resource priorities of the AFO staff. FULL ESSAY . FULL PDF MAP
CONTEST BACKGROUND: The Esri/SCGIS International Conservation Mapping Competition was organized in 2011 to find and recognize the best conservation mapping work in the world. It was a collaborative effort of the Esri Conservation Program, the Society for Conservation GIS, and the Society for Conservation Biology, all of whom participated in the selection and final judging. Esri had already been publishing an annual map book highlighting outstanding work in mapping and analysis worldwide, but this was the first time the Conservation GIS community was singled out to identify & publish the most significant examples of Conservation GIS mapping. It was also the first time that an accompanying essay was included and scored, describing how the map was created and what impact it had upon it's community. These essays are included in links at the bottom of each page. First published on the obscure conservationgis.org community site and in a hardcopy book, these entries are being reprinted here in 2020 because this was a watershed year in the evolution of conservation mapping. Apps and Web mapping had barely begun, and techniques for 3d effects and shaded relief were in their infancy. The explicit handling of time had yet to mature in interactive maps, and online collaborative platforms for community mapping had only barely begun. Storymaps were still many years in the future.
From the map book published out of this contest: "We specifically used the term "mapping" in order to take in the wide variety of digital and online work that have expanded our concept of mapping well beyond static paper maps. In all we received over 100 entries representing countries and projects all over the globe. We are especially grateful to the international Society for Conservation GIS, who played a critical role in reviewing and juding all of the entries. Comprised of Conservation GIS practicioners and senior organization staff from every major non-profit conservation group and many environmental agencies and businesses, SCGIS is the foremost society representing and supporting Conservation GIS professionals worldwide (www.scgis.org)"
"One criteria was to place equal emphasis on an essay where each entrant got to tell how they made their map. What was the story they needed to tell? How did they make decisions about what to include and what to leave out so that their map told that story best? In the end, the winners all displayed a deep consideration for design, systematic, thoughtful approaches to the problem of telling a specific story for a specific audience, leading to careful, reasoned decisions about how to build the map that best fulfilled that design. Sometimes a design calls for intricate details and complexity, where that's what works for the defined audience. Sometimes simplicity works best."
