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

Objectives: 1. Test the applicability of Southeastern Gap Analysis data in conservation planning at the regional level. 2. Develop an on-line decision support tool to provide researchers, students, and citizens access to conservation planning data. 3. Identify the key environmental drivers of vegetative communities in the Mid-Atlantic and Eastern Corn Belt and mapping of Ecological Systems. 4. Evaluate the utility of pattern recognition methods during image classification of herbaceous ecological systems and anthropogenic cover types. 5. Evaluate the utility of Light Detection and Radar (LiDAR) data for augmenting land cover data classes via sub-canopy structural information. 6. Comparative Analysis of the Ecological Systems based land cover data sets from the Gap Analysis Program and the U.S. Forest Service's LandFire Partnership. 7. Deductive modeling of vertebrate species habitat for Northeastern United States. 8. Test inductive habitat suitability modeling for priority bird species in selected Bird Conservation Regions of the Eastern United States. 9. Analyze the distribution and pattern of conservation lands throughout the Southeastern U.S. 10. Develop analyses for prioritizing conservation values of land trust lands in a regional context.