• Home
  • About
  • Data & Tools
  • Learning
  • In Action
  • Resources
  • Contact

Nature’s Network In Action

Who is using Nature’s Network?

Read stories and case studies from partners who are already using Nature’s Network to inform their work in land use planning and prioritization across the region.

Are you using Nature’s Network? Use this feedback form to tell us how.

State agencies

null

Christine Conn, Ph. D.

Landscape Conservation Planner for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Co-Chair of the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Habitat Goal Implementation Team (HGIT)

“It will be the recipe for conserving enough of the right kinds of habitat, in the right places, to support Chesapeake fish and wildlife, now and into the future.”

null

Chris Burkett

Wildlife Action Plan Coordinator, Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries

“No other tool has taken on the issue of restoration in such a robust way. It is an exciting tool, and it represents a huge opportunity for us.”

Federal programs

null

Alicia Logalbo

Chief of Environmental Analysis Section, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Norfolk District
“Regional information really helps you focus. You can fine tune it with local information or field visits, but regional perspective gives you the broad brush to optimize, and then zoom into important areas you can verify.”
null

Mitch Hartley

North Atlantic Coordinator, Atlantic Coast Joint Venture

“It is simple and easy to use, and allows our partners to explore the data by viewing or removing different data layers to understand what is influencing or driving the models.”

null

Dan Murphy

Chief, Division of Habitat Conservation, Chesapeake Bay Field Office, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Coastal Program

“None of the information we have worked with before was based on the degree of collaborative, careful, in-depth analysis as has gone into these products.”

Nongovernmental organizations

null

Carly Dean

Project Manager, Chesapeake Conservancy

“Never before has this kind of data been available to local communities, and that’s what brought them into the conversation. This information is helping them more easily answer questions that they have had for a long time.”

null

Michale Glennon

Director of Science, Wildlife Conservation Society, Adirondack Program

“It is such a powerful tool for demonstrating the status of habitat conservation in the Northeast region.”

Photos courtesy: USFWS, Nicholas A. Tonelli

  • Home
  • About
  • Data & Tools
  • Learning
  • In Action
  • Resources
  • Contact

Welcome to the Nature's Network Prioritization Tool

Using this tool, you can create custom models based on a catalog of over 400 metrics that will help address particular conservation and restoration questions. Some key features:

  • Quickly create custom prioritization maps
  • PDF and CSV outputs
  • Over 400 metrics

Metric description

Name:

Description:

Unit:

Full documentation link:

How does this work?

Load a model

What do these weights mean?

Each weight is a multiplier

When deciding how to assign weights, it is important to understand that each weight is a multiplier for its coresponding metric. After the tool standardizes the raw units of a metric to a quantile scale (0-1), it then multiplies that new value by the given weight. Any negative weight is flipped to a positive number and multiplied by the inverse of the metric's quantile score (this is to ensure a positive weighted score that is more intuitive for comparison). For more information, click "How does this work?" in the first panel above.

Caution

Use this control with a single map

This control limits the display of both the left and right maps. However, because the maps share the same legend, it can be difficult to distinguish them when parts of each are transparent. To avoid confusion, we recommend that this subset control be used when displaying a single map.

May not be useful for datasets with a small range or limited sample size

Each rank represents the percent of planning units less than or equal to this rank. As a result, for datasets with very small range (e.g. count of restoration practices in a single year) or limited sample size, there may be many planning units that share the same value (e.g., 0). In some of those cases, the minimum percentile rank could be relatively high and the subset controls may not seem to have an effect. If this appears to be happening, try clicking on a planning unit with a low score color to see what its percentile rank is.

Metric list