Freshwater Marsh Ecosystem Integrity - Blueprint 2.0
This layer is part of an older version of the Blueprint. This data represents the Blueprint 2.0 ecosystem integrity scores for the freshwater marsh ecosystem within the South Atlantic LCC geography. To read more about the indicators, please visit the indicator page.
Input Data and Mapping Steps
Indicators (200 m resolution) were spatially modeled, tested, reviewed, and used as inputs to derive high integrity areas. Please see the indicator folder in the Blueprint 2.0 data gallery for more information about indicator spatial data.
The integrity scores for this system are based on indicators within the freshwater marsh and landscapes ecosystem. These indicators served as inputs into Zonation, a conservation planning framework and software that produces a hierarchal prioritization of the landscape. Zonation employs an algorithm that proceeds by removing cells of lowest conservation value, minimizing marginal loss to produce a spatial prioritization at a fine scale.
Zonation parameters and inputs
--Inputs: Freshwater marsh indicator (freshwater marsh birds) and landscape indicators (low road density, resilient biodiversity hotspots, and low-urban historic landscapes).
--Removal rule = 1 (basic core-area Zonation): In basic core-area Zonation (commonly CAZ), cell removal is done in a manner that minimizes biological loss by picking the cell that has the smallest occurrence for the most valuable feature over all biodiversity features in the cell. In other words, the cell gets a high value if even one species has a relatively important occurrence there.
--Warp factor = 1: The warp factor defines how many cells are removed at a time per iteration. A lower warp factor provides a finer resolution, but requires a longer model run time. A higher warp factor reduces the time required to run a model, but results in a coarser resolution.
--Boundary length penalty (not used): Boundary length penalty (BLP) refers to the importance placed upon aggregating areas of high priority or value. Using a BLP, the hierarchy of cell removal is based upon the conservation value of the cell and the increase/decrease of boundary length that results from the removal of a cell.
--Edge removal = 0: Determines whether the program removes cells from the edges of remaining landscape (value = 1) or anywhere from the landscape (value = 0). Note that setting this parameter to 0 will increase the running times with large landscapes.
For more information on the reasoning behind the Zonation settings used for each ecosystem, please refer to the Blueprint 2.0 metadata under "lndicator Analysis".
