Steve Carter-Lovejoy, Virginia Natural Heritage Program

Steve Carter-Lovejoy is the natural heritage information manager for the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Annual goals are easy to lose sight of while swimming upstream against a continuing flow of short-term crises. State-mandated Employee Work Plans can help, because they are a useful tool for managers to use in setting performance targets with employees, but they make staff groan -- mostly because they're tied to an annual evaluation process. Formal evaluations are a good tool on paper, but without performance-based raises, they're all stick and no carrot. Virginia's state employees haven't had even a cost-of-living raise in several years, and given the state's current severe budget crisis we don't expect one for a while.

But still, the paperwork must be done. I'm directly responsible for three Employee Work Plans, but it's not such an onerous chore because the three people in question are excellent workers with ambitious plans and interesting tasks.

Joe Weber, one of our project managers, will primarily focus on the Virginia Conservation Lands Assessment, though he will also spend some time developing geographic information systems (GIS) data and maps for the distribution of the invasive grass Phragmites australis on the Eastern Shore and for the distribution of seasonal wetlands in the Manassas National Battlefield Park. GIS is a computer system capable of capturing, organizing, analyzing, and displaying geographically-referenced information. Examples of GIS products include maps of natural area preserves and conservation sites, identification of high-potential habitat for inventory, analysis of potential impacts to natural heritage resources of a new highway corridor, and design of conservation sites and interconnecting habitat corridors.

The Virginia Conservation Lands Assessment (VCLA) is a wonderful use of GIS to model, map, and prioritize conservation lands in Virginia. Starting with a satellite-based land cover for Virginia, and folding in scores of other geographic data that help characterize ecological significance and risk from development, the VCLA will identify and prioritize hubs -- relatively unfragmented natural habitats -- as well as corridors that can connect and support these hubs. Our goal is to create a tool that can direct land protection and acquisition toward the highest biodiversity priorities while maximizing the achievement of additional conservation goals for recreation, greenways, and historic/cultural resources.

Megan Rollins, our database manager, directs data management staff and is overseeing some dramatic changes in how we deal with data. We recently implemented Biotics, a new GIS-based application that interfaces with our traditional text-based database. Now, instead of putting dots on paper maps to represent natural heritage resource locations, we can trace the exact extent of a population occurrence on a computer screen, against a digital topographic or aerial photograph background. Using GIS software, we can display natural heritage resource locations however we need to, at various scales and in conjunction with other spatial data, and print whatever customized maps we need.

It's been a lot of work getting to this point, though -- not just for data-entry folks, but also for field staff, who now use global positioning systems and are learning to get comfortable with GIS. Though new data are entered in GIS, we have a big backlog of manually-mapped data that needs to be converted to GIS. One of Megan's principal roles in the coming year will be to prioritize and facilitate this conversion. She'll also continue to develop our GIS infrastructure so that VDCR staff can take advantage of our digital datasets for more sophisticated analyses. Perhaps her biggest responsibility will be to move forward with the next phase of implementing Biotics, replacing our 1970s-era database with a new system that will allow seamless integration of GIS data.

Megan and Rene Hypes, the project review coordinator, and I are meeting at 10 a.m. with a programmer from VDCR's Information Systems unit. She has been helping us design a new database to track project review information -- information about development projects that are sent to us for our review regarding potential impacts to natural heritage resources, and our responses and recommendations. Tomorrow I'll talk more about this, and about the work Rene's unit does to guide development away from negative impacts to natural heritage resources.