Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Georgia
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Georgia Project

An Adaptive Landscape Planning and Decision Framework for Gopher Tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) Conservation

July 2013 - June 2018

Personnel

Participating Agencies

  • NCSU USDI Climate Science Center

Our project goal is to develop a decision support system for the iterative selection of conservation actions that leads to a viable landscape supporting the statewide tortoise population and associated species and communities of interest. We will approach this goal by using principles of structured decision making, in which the decision maker, Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR), is directly involved in the articulation of objectives, the definition of alternative actions, and the development of predictive models to evaluate consequences of different actions. Key uncertainties that make the decision difficult will be identified with DNR and incorporated into the decision making framework. This work will result in an integrated system of databases, computer algorithms, and monitoring designs that provides a mostly automated process for decision making under uncertainty and for acquiring information to reduce uncertainty.

Research Publications Publication Date
Jafari, N., B. L. Nuse, C. T. Moore, B. Dilkina, and J. Hepinstall-Cymerman. 2017. Achieving full connectivity of sites in the Multiperiod Reserve Network Design Problem. Computers and Operations Research 81:119-127. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2016.12.017 | Abstract | Download | Publisher Website May 2017
Presentations Presentation Date
Moore, C. 2014. Adaptive landscape planning and decision framework for gopher tortoise conservation. Meeting of the Gopher Tortoise Candidate Conservation Agreement Team, 9 July 2014, Savannah, GA. July 2014
Moore, C. 2014. An adaptive landscape planning and decision framework for gopher tortoise conservation: Overview, progress, and reserve design needs. Meeting to consider research needs in dynamic reserve design, 24 April 2014, Gainesville, FL. April 2014
Moore, C., and J. Hepinstall-Cymerman. 2013. (Poster) A landscape planning and decision framework for gopher tortoise conservation in Georgia. 35th Annual Gopher Tortoise Council Meeting, 11-13 October 2013, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL. October 2013
Wright, A. D., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, L. L. Smith, and C. T. Moore. 2015. Long-term population ecology and large-scale movement patterns of gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) in southwestern Georgia. Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, 1-4 Nov 2015, Asheville, NC. November 2015
Wright, A. D., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, L. L. Smith, and C. T. Moore. 2014. (Poster) Long-term population ecology and large-scale movement patterns of gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) in southwest Georgia. 36th Annual Gopher Tortoise Council Meeting, 17-19 October 2014, Albany, GA. October 2014
Nuse, B. L., and C. T. Moore. 2014. (Poster) A Bayesian population model to inform gopher tortoise conservation planning in Georgia. 36th Annual Gopher Tortoise Council Meeting, 17-19 October 2014, Albany, GA. October 2014
Nuse, B. L., C. T. Moore, J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, and M. Elliott. 2015. (Poster) Comparing hypotheses about missed burrows in gopher tortoise line transect surveys: Bayesian distance analysis with data augmentation. 2015 Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting, 9-14 August 2015, Baltimore, MD. August 2015
Nuse, B. L., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, C. T. Moore, and M. Elliott. 2015. Assessing functional connectivity in the face of uncertainty about population processes: a Bayesian modeling approach applied to conservation of the gopher tortoise in Georgia, USA. International Association of Landscape Ecology World Congress, 5-10 July 2015, Portland, OR. July 2015
Nuse, B. L., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, C. T. Moore, and M. Elliott. 2015. Linking gopher tortoise processes and landscape resistance to assess functional connectivity of gopher tortoise populations in Georgia. Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, 1-4 Nov 2015, Asheville, NC. November 2015
Jafari, N., and C. T. Moore. 2014. Designing a dynamic reserve problem under stochastic uncertainties. INFORMS Annual Meeting, 9-12 November 2014, San Francisco, CA. November 2014
Jafari, N., and C. T. Moore. 2015. Achieving the spatial connectivity of parcels in the dynamic reserve network design problem. International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, 12-17 July 2015, Pittsburgh, PA. July 2015
Jafari, N., C. T. Moore, and J. Hepinstall-Cymerman. 2015. Solution alternatives to achieve parcel connectivity in the dynamic reserve design problem. Twenty-Ninth Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), Workshop on Computational Sustainability. 25 January 2015, Austin TX. January 2015
Moore, C. 2015. Adaptive landscape planning and decision framework for gopher tortoise conservation: Project update. Meeting of the Gopher Tortoise Candidate Conservation Agreement Team, 10 June 2015, Spanish Fort, AL. June 2015
Nuse, B. L., C. T. Moore, N. Jafari, J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, and M. Elliott. 2016. Informing reserve design with demography for gopher tortoise conservation planning in Georgia, USA. The Wildlife Society 23rd Annual Conference, 15-19 October 2016, Raleigh, NC. October 2016
Wright, A. D., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, L. L. Smith, C. T. Moore, and R. B. Chandler. 2016. Long-term population ecology and large-scale movement patterns of gopher tortoises in southwestern Georgia: A spatial capture-recapture approach. The Wildlife Society 23rd Annual Conference, 15-19 October 2016, Raleigh, NC. October 2016
Nuse, B. L., C. T. Moore, and J. Hepinstall-Cymerman. 2016. Predicting spatial structure in gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) populations in Georgia, USA. US-IALE 2016 Annual Meeting, 3-7 April 2016, Asheville, NC. April 2016
Wright, A. D., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, L. L. Smith, and C. T. Moore. 2016. Long-term population ecology and large-scale movement patterns of gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) in southwestern Georgia. US-IALE 2016 Annual Meeting, 3-7 April 2016, Asheville, NC. April 2016
Moore, C. T. 2015. ‘Sustainability’ in the eyes of a decision analyst: three case studies in conservation. 2015 Sustainability Science Symposium at UGA, 23 January 2015, Athens, GA January 2015
Wright, A.D., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, L. Smith, and C.T. Moore. 2015. (Poster) Data are scarce but action is necessary: Using agent-based models for conservation. Annual Student Conference on Conservation Science, 7-9 October 2015, New York, NY. October 2015
Wright, A. D., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, L. L. Smith, and C. T. Moore. 2015. Long-term population ecology and large-scale movement patterns of gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) in southwestern Georgia. 37th Annual Gopher Tortoise Council Meeting, 16-18 October 2015, Covington, LA. October 2015
Jafari, N., and C. Moore. 2015. Land development uncertainties in the dynamic reserve network design problem. INFORMS Annual Meeting, 1-4 Nov 2015, Philadelphia, PA. November 2015
Wright, A. D., J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, L. L. Smith, and C. T. Moore. 2016. (Poster) Long-term population ecology and large-scale movement patterns of gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) in southwestern Georgia. Annual Scientific Advisory Committee Meeting of the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center, 4 February 2016, Newton, GA. February 2016
Nuse, B. L., N. Jafari, R. L. Bormann, A. D. Wright, C. T. Moore, J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, and M. Elliott. 2016. Accommodating space and demographic uncertainty, in pursuit of gopher tortoise conservation in Georgia. Invited seminar. Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia. 27 October 2016 October 2016
Nuse, B. L., C. T. Moore, N. Jafari, J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, and M. Elliott. 2017. Optimal reserves for spatially structured gopher tortoise populations, under forecast landscape conditions in Georgia, USA. US-IALE 2017 Annual Meeting, 9-13 April 2017, Baltimore, MD. April 2017
Nuse, B. L., N. Jafari, C. T. Moore, J. Hepinstall-Cymerman, and M. Elliott. 2017. Informing reserve design with demography, for gopher tortoise conservation planning in Georgia. 2017 Wildlife Research Meeting, Georgia Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resources Division, 8 August 2017, Mansfield, GA. August 2017
Nuse, B. L., L. L. Smith, and C. T. Moore. 2018. An introduction to the Gopher Tortoise Demography Working Group. 40th Annual Gopher Tortoise Council Meeting, 12-14 October 2018, Lake Placid, FL. October 2018