{ "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": "

Inform COA<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>

Data included:<\/SPAN><\/SPAN> The goal of the Inform COA is to engage, educate, or encourage human (individual or collective) participation in conservation actions. For the inform COA, layers that represent access and proximity to conservation education and engagement opportunities were used. This included proximity to libraries, <\/SPAN><\/SPAN>Connecticut DEEP Property Access Locations<\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/A>, and nature and education centers, and town-level population density data from 2023 US Census Data. <\/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 combined into Zonation with equal positive weights of 1.0 and then values above 0.80 or top 20% of values were extracted for the Inform COA. <\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>

Potential uses:<\/SPAN><\/SPAN> Partners interested in increasing education and engagement opportunities and access to educational resources may reference this COA. This map represents locations with high human population densities but less nearby education or engagement opportunities. <\/SPAN><\/SPAN><\/P>

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