Protected Lands are essential to reversing catastrophic biodiversity loss. Numerous conservation and management organizations, including the federal government (America the Beautiful), have a goal to protect and manage 30% of lands and waters by 2030. This indicator assesses how close southeast Michigan watersheds are to the 30% goal for protected land.
How is it scored?
We included the total protected area from PAD-US 3.0 for all GAP statuses, which includes everything from permanently protected natural lands to conservation easements on working lands. We supplemented the PAD-US 3.0 lands with conservation easements from the EGLE conservation easement database and the National Conservation Easement Database. The total area of protected land was divided by the watershed area to calculate the percentage of protected land. The percentage of protected land was used as the watershed score, which was area-weighted to calculate an overall region score.
Data sources: PAD-US3.0 https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/62226321d34ee0c6b38b6be3; EGLE Conservation Easement Database https://gis-michigan.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/egle::egle-conservation-easements/explore; National Conservation Easement Database https://www.conservationeasement.us/.