Steve Carter-Lovejoy, Virginia Natural Heritage Program

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

That upgrade to Biotics that I mentioned yesterday? In this morning's email I learned that NatureServe just scheduled its installation for next week, and that before then we'll have to upgrade the software on our server. That means we'll have to scramble to check licenses, contact customer support (always an adventure), determine what is the bare minimum our server needs, and figure out how to squeeze money for the upgrades from our severely constricted budget.

The Nature Conservancy originally set up and supported the international network of natural heritage programs, of which there are now over 75. In 1999, NatureServe was spun off as an independent nonprofit to support and enhance the natural heritage network and to provide knowledge to protect biodiversity. (Check out their dynamite Explorer webtool for conservation information on over 50,000 plants, animals, and communities.) The Virginia Natural Heritage Program is a charter member of NatureServe, and we've been one of its pilot programs for implementing new information-management technologies. Working on the cutting edge is exciting, but scary, too!

Yesterday I helped review the latest edition of the database we're developing to track information for the project review section. Information on natural heritage resources doesn't do any good unless someone's using it, and project review is a critical function for us. We review over 3,000 projects per year from across the state, checking to see if they are likely to have any impact on documented natural heritage resources and making recommendations for avoidance or mitigation if they might. Keeping track of all the information is a big job, and we think this new database will make that job easier.

Our project review clients represent a broad range of needs -- teachers and students seeking environmental education materials, private landowners wanting to know what's on their land, academic researchers, localities that want to direct growth away from sensitive areas, and state and federal agencies. Our biggest client is the Virginia Department of Transportation. Though the sheer scale of the road network across the state makes VDOT the largest single threat to Virginia's biodiversity, we have a positive relationship with them; they are helping to fund our data-development work, and they are reasonably responsive to our recommendations.

Our next largest category of clients is environmental regulatory agencies. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality all use our data to help determine whether, and with what conditions, to issue wetland-development permits and approve other activities that require federal review. We are not a regulatory program; we cannot tell anyone what to do. But our data and recommendations are respected and used by regulatory agencies, so we really get the best of both worlds. We are part of the regulatory process, but we just recommend; others make the hard decisions to require or ignore our recommendations. As a non-regulatory agency, we can more easily gain the trust necessary to help landowners provide appropriate protection and stewardship for their rare species and communities. And developers and their consultants, knowing that regulatory agencies have our data, voluntarily approach us for information so they can incorporate our recommendations into their plans before those plans are submitted for permits and approvals -- better planning, fewer costly "train wrecks."

There's a tricky balancing act that goes into deciding just how to release information on rare species. People can't look out for what they don't know, but providing location information puts species at risk -- and not just from malicious vandals, but also from nature lovers who, in their interest to observe might trample a small-whorled pogonia or a piping plover nest. Landowners have every right to know what's on their property; we also provide as much locational information as is necessary in our project review responses to allow developers to minimize their impacts. For others, Virginia has a progressive exception in its Freedom of Information Act that allows us to protect sensitive information about natural heritage resources, so we can make decisions in the best interest of the resource.

In the last two years, we have created a new GIS coverage: conservation sites. Conservation sites are areas that include one or more natural heritage resources and the additional habitat necessary to support them. They are drawn from ecological needs, not from property or political boundaries. We have now drawn almost 2,000 sites that incorporate all documented and currently extant natural heritage resource occurrences in Virginia. By focusing on the land instead of on rare species, we provide a data coverage that is not as sensitive as the exact locations of these rare species. We are working to make this information widely available as a tool for screening projects, so that agencies, localities, and developers can do their own project review, only sending us those projects that overlap with conservation sites so that we can provide more detailed recommendations. Then we can focus our limited resources on those projects with likely impacts on rare species, saving us from spending lots of time on the majority of projects that won't have any impact.

I've used my allotted words, and a party beckons. We've grown from a small program with about 15 staff in one office supporting six natural area preserves to 50-plus employees scattered around the state supporting 36 preserves. Remaining a focused, integrated agency is a challenge that we address in part with monthly all-staff meetings and (today) holiday parties. It's always fun to collect stories from the field!