Conservation Design Project Nears Completion MS student Luz Lumb and Dr. Gibeaut traveled to the headquarters of Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve (MANERR) in Port Aransas on Wednesday, July 24th to present preliminary results and get stakeholder feedback for their contributions to the Gulf Coast Prairie Landscape Conservation Cooperative funded project Employing the Conservation Design Approach on Coastal Avian Habitats along the Central Texas Coast. This is a landscape-scale conservation planning project managed by the International Crane Foundation in collaboration with the MANERR, Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, The Nature Conservancy, and the Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying Science here at TAMUCC. The conservation design approach focuses on using geospatial data, biological information, and models to develop maps and other tools that can guide habitat conservation decisions in a quantitative way.  Potential high, low, and intermittent use habitat was determined for the whooping crane and a suite of other coastal avian species along the central Texas coast. A major goal in conservation design is to assess every single acre of habitat on a landscape scale in terms of its potential to support a species or assemblage of species. CMGL’s role in this project is the acquisition and development of spatial data for this project, including land cover information, bird surveys, Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), and sea level rise model outputs. The final product will be explicit maps of current and future potential habitat for high, low, and intermittent use for the endangered whooping crane to guide conservation efforts to achieve 120,000 acres of protected habitat to support the endangered species down-listing goal of 1000 cranes. According to current estimates, there is only enough protected winter habitat to support about 500 whooping cranes. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that a thousand birds are needed to move the whooping crane from endangered to threatened status. The methodology developed here will employ biological data provided by the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory to assess potential habitat for a suite of important birds in the Central Texas Coast, and methods will be recommended to extend this approach to larger portions of the Gulf Coast Prairie Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GCPLCC). The Composite Habitat Type dataset was developed from three existing land cover datasets covering benthic, wetland/intertidal, and upland environments. At the workshop, Luz presented the Composite Habitat Type dataset she developed for this project, as well as a methodology for identifying changes to potential whooping crane habitat under various sea level rise scenarios as projected by the Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM). Dr. Gibeaut provided technical expertise on geospatial techniques and the acquisition and development of spatial data. Dr. Liz Smith of the International Crane Foundation (and member of Luz’s thesis committee), gave an overview of the progress of the entire project (almost done!) and led discussion about potential habitat maps developed for a variety of other birds. The stakeholders present represented state and federal wildlife management agencies as well as non-governmental conservation planning organizations. Workshop participants represented a wealth of academic and field experience related to habitat use for certain bird species and on-the-ground configuration of habitat and land cover. Their feedback proved extremely valuable for the refinement of species’ needs maps and in understanding the benefits and limitations of various land cover data sets used in the development of the Composite Habitat Type dataset. Next steps for the project include incorporating participant’s input and completing the final report.