Conservation planning in Central Texas

Biodiversity and ecological functionality are being lost rapidly due to human transformation of the environment around the planet. Lands dedicated to conservation of biodiversity and ecological functionality play a key role in mitigating and reversing these losses. This study looks at how conservation planning practices can be integrated into an urban-rural area with numerous conservation needs, heterogeneous environments, and rapidly expanding human populations. The study area consists of the five counties in Central Texas surrounding the City of Austin that are being evaluated for land use by the Envision Central Texas project. Conservation tools used are: 1) environmental space graphs and 2) systematic conservation planning. Environmental space graphs are a straightforward, qualitative visualization tool to analyze the relationships of environmental variables, biodiversity records, existing open space, and proposed conservation lands. Systematic conservation planning used complementarity, .a step-wise process, to select prioritization areas. Selection was based on the occurrence of conservation elements in the following categories: species, species assemblages, topography, soils, geology, weather, critical water quality areas, Edwards Aquifer zones, watersheds, and vulnerability. Forty prioritization runs, each varying the importance of different conservation elements, showed a spectrum of conservation scenarios for Central Texas. Prioritization results were evaluated based on their representation of biodiversity and environmental variables, the total size of the prioritized areas, feasibility, the use of lexical order in the selection process, and irreplaceability—the repeated occurrence of an area in multiple prioritizations. The actual process of systematic conservation planning was evaluated for its usability within the study area and with available data typesGeography and the Environmen