Provisional Conservation Opportunity Areas—Georgia

Key to Acronyms:

This map, showing provisional conservation opportunity areas and existing conservation lands in Georgia, was created as part of an effort to develop a Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy, which is required by states desiring to qualify for federal State Wildlife Grants.

Under contract with the Natural Resources Spatial Analysis Laboratory at the University of Georgia, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division, developed raster databases using Esri^® software and FRAGSTATS to model the distribution of large contiguous patches of natural vegetation. The strategy requires that a systematic effort to identify areas that represent conservation opportunities be undertaken, and the combination of grids produced by the FRAGSTATS analysis and grids representing predicted vertebrate species of threatened habitats and documented occurrences of rare species of concern meet this need and are represented in this map. The areas are considered provisional because at this stage, no attempt has been made to determine underlying patterns of landownership and landowner attitudes toward wildlife conservation.

By assisting future habitat protection efforts in focusing on those areas where densities of predicted or documented species occur with large, contiguous patches of natural vegetation, a systematic approach to species protection can be taken, avoiding the subjective approaches used in the past.