{ "culture": "en-US", "name": "", "guid": "", "catalogPath": "", "snippet": "The 2025 Connecticut State Wildlife Action Plan conservation opportunity areas (COAs) represent locations partners can conduct actions to benefit wildlife populations and habitats and achieve State Wildlife Action Plan Goals. There are 7 total COAs that represent broad actions: protect, connect, restore, manage, partner, inform, and research and monitor. This effort combined ecological and social data in a spatial prioritization software called Zonation to identify priority areas that reflect the 7 actions. Each COA has different ecological and/or social data included to reflect its unique goal.", "description": "

Partner COA<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>

Data included: <\/SPAN><\/SPAN>The goal of the Partner COA is to collaborate across disciplines, specializations, and partners to achieve State Wildlife Action Plan goals. For the partner COA, several partner priority areas that included private, non-governmental organizations, local, state, and federal maps were used, including The National Audubon Society Important Bird Areas, the <\/SPAN><\/SPAN>USFWS Highland Conservation Area Boundary<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/A>, <\/SPAN><\/SPAN>2020 CT Forest Action Plan priority areas <\/SPAN><\/SPAN>(<\/SPAN><\/SPAN>The 2015 Forest Fragmentation Map<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/A> core forest)<\/SPAN><\/SPAN>, <\/SPAN><\/SPAN>Forest Planning Opportunity Map<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/A>, the list of Trout Unlimited priority waterbodies, and the map of thematic overlap in the town Plans of Conservation and Development with the 2015 CT State Wildlife Action Plan. <\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>

View the full methods for all COAs in Appendix 4.6 in the <\/SPAN><\/SPAN>2025 CT State Wildlife Action Plan<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/A>. <\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>

Spatial prioritization:<\/SPAN><\/SPAN> <\/SPAN><\/SPAN>Zonation software iteratively ranks each pixel in a 10.0 m resolution grid of Connecticut for its conservation value and gives each cell a score based on that ranking, prioritizing areas with a high density of layers, balance between layers, and minimizing conservation loss. Rank values range from 0-1, with 1 having the highest conservation value and 0 having the lowest. Each layer is given a relative weight based on its importance compared to the other layers used, where a positive higher weight makes that layer a higher conservation priority compared to the other layers. All these layers were input into Zonation with equal positive weights of 1.0 and then values above 0.80 or top 20% of values were extracted for the Partner COA.<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>

Potential uses:<\/SPAN><\/SPAN> Partners interested in collaborating and determining where priorities from different organizations overlap may reference this map. Collaborations could provide technical and financial support through sharing resources, grant applications, or knowledge and expertise. <\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>

Recommended actions (example actions):<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>