1. The Natural Resource Planner and Kansas Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool Dana Peterson, KBS, KDWPT Mike Houts, Gina Ross and Jennifer Delisle, KBS

2. KDWPT-KBS collaboration Kansas Natural Resource Planner (NRP) Kansas Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool (CHAT)

3. The Natural Resource Planner (NRP) A non-regulatory tool for development project and conservation planning and environmental review in Kansas. Initially developed during the surge of wind development projects in Kansas, but the NRP has grown and expanded in terms of data, applications and end-users. Provide data on a wide range of variables, terrestrial and aquatic to maximize the audience served.

4. NRP Design Transparent development process Incorporates only those data that are quantifiable, repeatable, and non-subjective Decisions are driven by best available science or expert opinion Subjective to updates, revisions, added content, redesigns

6. NRP Contents Three types of data: base data, industry specific and natural resource 40+ data layers in fourteen categories Data sources: DASC, KDWPT, KSNHI, others Updates occur at varying intervals

7. Kansas Natural Resource Planner (NRP) http://kars.ku.edu/maps/naturalresourceplanner/

9. Kansas Natural Resource Planner (NRP): CHAT

10. Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool (CHAT) History 2008: the Western Governor’s Association (WGA) created a Wildlife Council to identify and conserve crucial wildlife habitat and corridors across the region. 2010: the Wildlife Council conducted pilot projects with participating states to develop a non-regulatory landscape level planning tool. 2011: the Wildlife Council established a plan to develop a West-wide GIS tool to launch by 2013. December 2013: WGA CHAT launched 2015: WGA transferred the CHAT to the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA).

11. CHAT Objective The interactive online tool serves as a common starting point across the West for the intersection of development and wildlife to enable industry to reduce time, costs, conflicts and surprises – and inform conservation groups – while helping state agencies ensure wildlife values are better incorporated into land use decision-making.

12. Key Points A multi-state collaboration (e.g. states identify common landscape themes representing important habitat), but CHAT is a state-driven product. State wildlife experts decided the wildlife priorities to address. State-generated data and models. Habitat ranking scale set by state experts according to state priorities. States update and maintain.

13. Data Input: Landscape Themes Collect data and process data inputs to best represent the 7 landscape themes Landscape Corridors

14. Terrestrial Species Of Concern Aquatic Species Of Concern Natural Veg. Comm. Wetland Riparian Habitats Spp. of Economic & Rec Importance Data Input: Landscape Themes

15. Customized Rule-set

16. Landscape Aggregate Rankings SOC Intact Landscapes Natural Vegetation Corridors Wetland / Riparian SERI 1 6 Highest PriorityLowest Priority

17. Crucial habitat is not species specific, but is based on observations and modeled distributions of many species and habitats of conservation interest. CHAT Roll-Up

18. Kansas Crucial Habitats 16 Highest PriorityLowest Priority Rank# hexagons% of KS 1 8,2599.9% 2 21,60226.0% 3 5,7837.0% 4 12,20614.7% 5 9,02510.9% 6 26,20231.5% Arikaree Breaks Smoky Hills Red Hills Cimarron Flint Hills

19. State Data funneled into WAFWA CHAT http://www.wafwachat.org/

23. Ongoing and Future Efforts Maintain and update: Typically annual, KS SWAP update Integrate new, relevant datasets as they become available Continue to explore utility across industry and agencies State CHAT Data Community (SCDC)

24. State CHAT Data Community Pilot 5 states: Kansas, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Washington Three objectives: 1.Make updates and maintenance easy by leveraging USGS ScienceBase-Catalog as a common platform to support State updates and maintenance of CHAT.

25. State CHAT Data Community 2. Build federal partnerships to: – Provide better access and flow of information to Federal partners. Authorized partner users--Drill down tools for data summaries Tool development/tutorials for using CHAT and integrating federal data into CHAT (INTEGRATE YOUR DATA) – Potentially provide States access to Federal data relevant to crucial fish and wildlife habitat for CHAT integration.

26. State CHAT Data Community 3. Ensure scalability and flexibility: – Multi-scale to allow sharing of sensitive data – Expand CHAT eastward to include the remaining US and Coastal Economic Exclusivity Zone (EEZ) Nested spatial units: 1mi 2 Hexagon to 7 mi 2 honeycomb

27. Thank you! http://kars.ku.edu/maps/naturalresourceplanner/ http://www.wafwachat.org/ Dana Peterson dpeterson@ku.edu 785-864-1510