Planning Focus
The planning focus in NatureServe Vista is the conservation element, which represents the features you want to conserve in your area. These can be biological elements such as species and ecosystems, culturally-significant elements such as historic or cultural landmarks, or socially-important elements such as viewsheds or prime agricultural soils.
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NatureServe Vista
What’s New in Our Latest Release
A Team Approach
A defensible project will encompass the skills of a variety of disciplines including planners, GIS, scientists, and other discipline experts as well as engaging decision makers and citizens. NatureServe Vista is designed to utilize the expert knowledge and skills of experts then hand off the tools and database to planners and managers to make informed decisions. Stakeholders can be engaged in a number of ways to gather their knowledge, values, and desired outcomes which can be analyzed with solid data, expert knowledge, and validated planning concepts and approaches.
Identify Your Conservation Elements
The first step in the conservation planning process is identifying and defining your conservation elements. These features can be anything you want to conserve, represent, restore, or are otherwise required to assess impacts upon. Examples include species, habitat, ecosystems, agriculture areas, scenic views, historic sites or any land use you want to assure you meet a minimum level of representation. NatureServe Vista provides two tools to assist you in completing this step. Learn More...
Summarize Conservation Value
With NatureServe Vista you can create a large number of value maps of your area that allow you to map and explore indices that combine your conservation elements and their attributes. These value maps depict such things as element diversity, element importance (e.g., imperilment or legal status), ecological or habitat condition, data confidence, or any combination of these concepts. These maps can help you to identify the suitability of locations for conservation or economic land uses. Learn More...
Evaluate Scenarios/Cumulative Impact Assessment
Scenarios integrate numerous maps and other information to depict what is or could be happening on the ground and in the air and water. Optionally you can include the policy mechanisms that cause uses, practices, or disturbances to happen or not. NatureServe Vista provides a rich set of functions to import data, crosswalk it to a common classification of land use and policy types, and depict the distribution of land uses, disturbances, management practices, climate change effects, invasive species spread, etc. You can depict as many scenarios as you wish such as current actual land use, future scenarios based on current policy or economic or ecological trends, proposal based scenarios, etc. From there you can set quantitative goals and assess how well any scenario meets those goals and where the conflicts are if any as well as where weak policies could be bolstered to increase goal achievement. Scenarios also interact with the Ecological Condition Modeling function to map and assess current and potential future conditions of your conservation elements. Learn More...
Model Ecological Condition
Condition scores for conservation element distributions represent where elements are most viable and can assist in conserving the best locations as well as identifying areas where more compatible land uses or restoration may be necessary. Vista supports creating condition models for individual elements or, for efficiency, groups of elements that respond similarly to disturbances. Condition models can include effects from terrestrial, air/climatic, and water uses and disturbances. Models can also include water pollution as modeled by the N-SPECT software interoperating with Vista. Learn More...
Explore Sites and Create Mitigation Plans
With NatureServe Vista you can investigate your analyses results and propose alternatives. Select one or a group of sites and see the inventory of conservation elements and land uses mapped for the site, how the elements are responding to the land uses, and how the site is or could be contributing to your goals. Select an alternative land use and implementation mechanism (policy, purchase, funding source, etc.) and instantly see the results. Use it to quickly assess impacts from development proposals or benefits from conservation proposals. Save your results to create entire new alternative scenarios or single site mitigations. Learn More...
Generate Efficient Solutions
NatureServe Vista works with industry-standard scenario generation software MARXAN and SPOT to help you create efficient plan solutions. These tools will help you generate a set of proposed areas to help meet your goals then you can import them into NatureServe Vista to specify compatible land uses and appropriate implementation mechanisms. Learn More...
Document Your Analyses and Generate Reports
NatureServe Vista offers unequaled functions for documenting all sources of information and decisions affecting your results. It has extensive reporting capability that enables you to communicate with decision makers and constituents, enhancing your ability to implement the land use or management plans that you produce. Learn More...
Work Efficiently, Dynamically, and Adaptively
NatureServe Vista’s design simplifies the process of conducting the complex analyses needed to support land use planning and resource management decisions. This reduces the amount of hands-on time that is required to perform analyses. NatureServe Vista is also designed to support the full process from information gathering and planning to implementation, monitoring, and adaptive planning and management. Learn More...