Appalachian LCC Conservation Planning Specialist Earns PhD
His work has helped redesign and enhance state-of-the-art habitat connectivity maps that can be paired with satellite imagery to display the potential cooridors used by animal populations to move between both large and small areas. These maps help both individual landowners and NGOs redefine conservation priorities, and are critical to LCCs as they develop their own initiatives for conservation planning and design that span multiple states.
For the past three years, Leonard has been the conservation planning specialist for the Appalachian LCC, helping to coordinate and run modeling on several funded research projects. Most recently, he help develop a draft regional conservation plan for the Cooperative using an interactive and iterative spatial prioritization framework. Using available data and modeling approaches that are well supported in the literature, he and researchers from Clemson University developed conservation planning models that include site selection, ecological threat assessments, and broad ranging habitat and ecological connectivity analyses. They are now working on phase two of this work that is integrating aquatic and cultural resource components into the design work.
