GIS Helps California Audubon Identify Essential Bird Habitat
Important Bird Area Sites Defined on Digital Map of the State
Redlands, California—March 23, 2009—Conservationists, bird watchers, farmers, and developers across the state of California can now access bird habitat information from a digital bank of maps and data created with ESRI's geographic information system (GIS) technology. Commissioned by the National Audubon Society and BirdLife International, the Important Bird Areas (IBA) program designates locations essential for breeding, wintering, and/or migrating birds. Conservation activities at these sites include land acquisition, habitat restoration, advocacy on behalf of IBA, and education to local communities about their unique birds and bird habitats.
Through the Audubon California Web site (
www.ca.audubon.org/iba), users can now quickly find answers to questions such as, What is the total acreage of all IBA land? Who are the major land owners? What percentage of IBA designations are in some form of protection?
Through a partnership between Audubon California and California Polytechnic State University, the maps and database supporting the California IBA project were created by David Yun, GIS supervisor for the City of San Luis Obispo, and a group of students from Cal Poly's Natural Resources Management Department. The team used ESRI's suite of ArcGIS software, designed to help users organize, visualize, and analyze layers of disparate geographic data with dynamic maps and geodatabases.
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ArcGIS Desktop provided the most complete set of tools required to complete our mapping project," said Andrea Jones, director of the Important Bird Areas program for Audubon California. "Two critical ArcGIS Desktop applications were ArcCatalog and ArcMap. We used ArcCatalog to manage all GIS layers, and ArcMap to digitize boundaries, analyze data, and create maps and graphics."
With GIS, the IBA maps brought together topographic maps from the U.S. Geological Survey; wildlife habitat relationship data from the California Department of Fish and Game; digital photographs from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP); and shapefiles of protected and conservation lands, counties, roads, and waterways from the California Spatial Information Library.
More than 10,000 IBA sites in nearly 200 countries and territories have been identified since the IBA program's inception in the 1980s. Bird-Life International estimates that hundreds of sites and millions of acres have received better protection as a result of the IBA program. A major objective of the IBA program is the protection of vulnerable birds. Of particular concern are species that are not widely distributed or are concentrated in one general habitat type or biome; and individual or groups of species, such as waterfowl or shorebirds, that congregate at high densities due to their gregarious behavior.
About ESRI
Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at
www.esri.com.
Contact:
Jessica Wyland
ESRI
Tel.: 909-793-2853, extension 1-3345
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