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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: HUC6 Aquatic Cores and Buffers

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  The HUC6 aquatic cores and associated buffers represent some of the principal Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) landscape conservation design (LCD) products for aquatic ecosystems and species, and they are best understood in the context of the full LCD process described in detail in the technical document on landscape design (McGarigal et al 2017). These products were initially developed for the Connecticut River watershed as part of the Connect the Connecticut project (www.connecttheconnecticut.org) — a collaborative partnership under the auspices of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), and subsequently developed for the entire Northeast region as part of the Nature's Network project (www.naturesnetwork.org). HUC6 aquatic cores represent a combination of lotic core areas (river and stream) and lentic core areas (lake and pond) selected at the HUC6 scale (Fig. 1). In combination with the terrestrial cores, they spatially represent the ecological network designed to provide strategic guidance for conserving natural areas, and the fish, wildlife, and other components of biodiversity that they support within the Northeast.

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Local and Regional Vulnerability

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  Local and HUC6 regional vulnerability are two of the principal Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) landscape conservation design (LCD) products, which are best understood in the context of the full LCD process described in detail in the technical document on landscape design (McGarigal et al 2017). T These products were initially developed for the Connecticut River watershed as part of the Connect the Connecticut project (www.connecttheconnecticut.org) — a collaborative partnership under the auspices of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), and subsequently developed for the entire Northeast region as part of the Nature's Network project (www.naturesnetwork.org).

  These two vulnerability products represent the vulnerability of high-valued places to future development, but differ in whether they reflect potential impacts of development on connectivity independent of any designated terrestrial cores (local vulnerability) or dependent on the designated cores (HUC6 regional vulnerability).

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Probability of Development

  Kevin McGarigal, Ethan Plunkett, Brad Compton, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  The integrated probability of development (probDevelop) is derived from an extraordinarily complex urban growth model described in detail in the technical document on urban growth (McGarigal et al 2017). The urban growth model is one of the major landscape change drivers in our Landscape Change, Assessment and Design (LCAD) model, in which it functions to simulate the stochastic growth of low-, moderate- and highintensity development during each 10-year timestep of a 70-year simulation between 2010- 2080. Because the urban growth model simulates the spatial footprint of development as a stochastic process, the development that occurs in any one simulation is merely a single stochastic realization of what could happen. Thus, any single urban growth realization is not particularly useful in landscape design. Instead, we developed this product to represent the integrated probability of development occurring between 2010-2080, which accounts for the type (low-, medium-, and high-intensity), amount and spatial pattern of development. This index represents the probability of development integrated across all of the possible development transitions occurring sometime between 2010 and 2080 at the 30 m cell level.

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Northeast terrestrial ecosystem cores

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  Northeast terrestrial ecosystem cores is one of the principal Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) landscape conservation design (LCD) products, and it is best understood in the context of the full LCD process described in detail in the technical document on landscape design (McGarigal et al 2017). This particular product was developed for the Nature's Network project (www.naturesnetwork.org) — a collaborative partnership under the auspices of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC). Northeast terrestrial ecosystem cores represents a set of terrestrial core areas derived using only ecosystem-based criteria (i.e., no species-specific criteria) and scaled to identify the highest valued places by ecosystem and geophysical setting within the Northeast region (Fig. 1). These core areas are intended to complement the HUC6-scaled terrestrial core areas and connectors (see terrestrial core area network document, McGarigal et al 2017) that were derived as the primary ecological network. These regional ecosystem-based cores help identify the best places for each unique ecosystem and geophysical setting within the entire Northeast region, whereas the HUC6-based cores help identify the best places within each HUC6 to ensure a well-distributed core area network across the region. Both of these products are designed to provide strategic guidance for conserving natural areas, and the fish, wildlife, and other components of biodiversity that they support within the Northeast.

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: HUC6 Core Tiers

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  HUC6 terrestrial core tiers is one of the principal landscape conservation design (LCD) products, and it is best understood in the context of the full LCD process described in detail in the technical document on landscape design (McGarigal et al 2017). This particular product was initially developed for the Connecticut River watershed as part of the Connect the Connecticut project (www.connecttheconnecticut.org) — a collaborative partnership under the auspices of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), and subsequently developed for the entire Northeast region as part of the Nature's Network project (www.naturesnetwork.org). HUC6 terrestrial core tiers represents a two-tiered, spatially-nested hierarchy of terrestrial core areas and supporting landscapes. These tiers in combination with the HUC6 terrestrial core-connector network (see terrestrial core area network document, McGarigal et al 2017) and the aquatic core areas (see aquatic core areas document, McGarigal et al 2017) spatially represent a tiered ecological network for the Northeast region. This ecological network is designed to provide strategic guidance for conserving natural areas, and the fish, wildlife, and other components of biodiversity that they support within the Northeast.

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: HUC6 Terrestrial Core-Connector Network

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  The HUC6 terrestrial core-connector network is one of the principal Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) landscape conservation design (LCD) products, and it is best understood in the context of the full LCD process described in detail in the technical document on landscape design (McGarigal et al 2017). This particular product was initially developed for the Connecticut River watershed as part of the Connect the Connecticut project (www.connecttheconnecticut.org) — a collaborative partnership under the auspices of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), and subsequently developed for the entire Northeast region as part of the Nature's Network project (www.naturesnetwork.org). The HUC6 terrestrial coreconnector network represents a set of terrestrial core areas and the connectors between them. In combination with the aquatic core areas, they spatially represent the ecological network designed to provide strategic guidance for conserving natural areas, and the fish, wildlife, and other components of biodiversity that they support within the Northeast

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Local and Regional Conductance

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  Local and HUC6 regional conductance are two of the principal Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) landscape conservation design (LCD) products, which are best understood in the context of the full LCD process described in detail in the technical document on landscape design (McGarigal et al 2017). These particular products were initially developed for the Connecticut River watershed as part of the Connect the Connecticut project (www.connecttheconnecticut.org) — a collaborative partnership under the auspices of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), and subsequently developed for the entire Northeast region as part of the Nature's Network project (www.naturesnetwork.org).

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Subregions and urban growth associated with the SPRAWL paper

  Kevin McGarigal, Ethan Plunkett, Lisabeth L. Willey, Brad Compton, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Hillshade

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: States

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Ecoregions

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Northeast region

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Roads

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Edited high-resolution NHD flowlines

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Untransformed average annual daily traffic rate

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: HUC6 Watersheds

  Kevin McGarigal, Ethan Plunkett, Brad Compton, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  This layer defines the subregions used for building cores in DSL landscape design (see technical document on landscape design, McGarigal et al 2017). It is based on the USGS Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC) as extended in the USDA Watershed Boundary Dataset at the 6th level of the hierarchy (thus HUC6). In their original form these represent watersheds, sections of watersheds, and, especially in coastal areas, collections of watersheds of approximately equal size. They were chosen as the basic unit of our analysis because they were the size that stakeholders desired for subregions; are defined largely by natural boundaries, and are reasonably compact. We clipped the HUC6 boundaries to the Northeast Region and then manually edited the boundaries to make the HUCs and HUC fragments that remained within the Northeast Region more uniform in size and eliminate most disjunct HUC6s.

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Climate Stress Metric

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  Climate is a major factor in determining ecosystem distribution, composition, structure and function. Therefore, with climate change it is reasonable to anticipate heterogeneous climate stress across the landscape in response to heterogeneous shifts in climate normals (Iverson et al. 2014). The climate stress metric assesses the estimated climate stress that may be exerted on a focal cell in 2080 based on departure from the current climate niche breadth of the corresponding ecosystem. Essentially, this metric measures the magnitude of climate change stress at the focal cell based on the current climate niche of the corresponding ecosystem and the predicted change in climate (i.e., how much is the climate of the focal cell moving away from the current climate niche of the corresponding ecosystem) between 2010-2080 based on the average of two climate change scenarios (see below) (Fig. 1). Cells where the predicted climate suitability in the future decreases (i.e., climate is becoming less suitable for that ecosystem) are considered stressed, and the stress increases as the predicted climate becomes less suitable based on the ecosystem's current climate niche model. Conversely, cells where the predicted climate suitability in the future increases (i.e., climate is improving for that ecosystem) are considered unstressed and assigned a value of zero.

  The climate stress metric is an element of the ecological integrity analysis of the Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) project (see technical document on integrity, McGarigal et al 2017). Consisting of a composite of 21 stressor and resiliency metrics, the index of ecological integrity (IEI) assesses the relative intactness and resiliency to environmental change of ecological systems throughout the northeast. As a stressor metric, climate stress values range from 0 (no effect from climate stress) to a theoretical maximum of 1 (severe effect; although in real landscapes, the metric never reaches 1). Note that the climate stress metric is computed separately for each ecosystem because each ecosystem has its own estimated climate niche (see below). This contrasts with all other stressor metrics, which are computed i

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: DSLland and Subsysland

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  DSLland is the land cover map used as an organizational framework in the Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) project (McGarigal et al 2017). It is derived primarily from The Nature Conservancy's Northeast Habitat Classification

  map (Ferree and Anderson 2013; Anderson et al. 2013; Olivero and Anderson 2013; Olivero-Sheldon et al 2014). To meet the needs of the DSL project, we substantially modified the TNC map. The TNC map is a hierarchical classification. For our purposes, we adopted the 'habitat' level of the hierarchy, which we refer to as "ecosystems", as our finest scale, as it is the most appropriate classification for our ecological assessment. The attribute table also includes the ‘formation’ level for users that prefer a coarse classification.

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  Ecological integrity metrics: All integrity data products

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan B. Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  The ecological integrity products represent a set of metrics corresponding to our ecosystem-based ecological assessment in 2010 (see Integrity document for details). The ecological integrity metrics include a variety of measures of intactness and resiliency. The individual metrics are also combined into a composite local index of ecological integrity (IEI).

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: The index of ecological impact

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  Includes five landscape change scenarios: 1) baseline 70-year (2010-2080) climate change and urban growth scenario without additional land protection; 2) same as #1 but with 25% more demand for new development; 3) same as #1 but with increased sprawl to the pattern of development; 4) same as #1 but with both 25% more demand for new development and increased sprawl; and 5) same as #1 but with additional terrestrial reserve areas (core areas) protected from development as established for Nature's Network landscape design (www.naturesnetwork.org).

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Habitat loss, mowing and plowing, microclimate alterations, edge predators, domestic predators, invasive plants, and invasive earthworms metrics

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  This document describes a suite of stressor metrics that assess different aspects of the effects of roads and development on ecological integrity (see technical document on integrity, McGarigal et al 2017). They share a common algorithm, but each has unique parameters. These metrics are obviously highly correlated, but each assesses a different aspect of the effects of roads and development on ecological integrity. These metrics are elements of the ecological integrity analysis of the Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) project (McGarigal et al 2017). Consisting of a composite of 21 stressor and resiliency metrics, the index of ecological integrity (IEI) assesses the relative intactness and resiliency to environmental change of ecological systems throughout the northeast. These stressor metrics range from 0 (no effect) to 1 (severe effect). See Table 1 for parameters for each metric. Habitat loss. Assesses the intensity of past habitat loss caused by all forms of development. Direct habitat loss is the primary cause of species decline and extinction; this metric is an index of indirect habitat loss—the decline of integrity in remaining natural lands due to the loss of former habitat in the neighborhood to past development. Mowing and plowing. Assess the intensity of agriculture in the neighborhood as a surrogate for mowing and plowing rates, which are direct sources of animal mortality. Agricultural machinery is a well-known cause of mortality for grassland bird nestlings and terrestrial and semi-aquatic turtles. Microclimate alterations. Assesses microclimatic alterations due to edge effects, such decreased moisture, higher wind, and more extreme temperatures. This metric includes the effects of both anthropogenic edges and natural edges (e.g., the effects of an open marsh on the surrounding forest). Edge predators. Assesses the effect of human commensal mesopredators such as raccoons and skunks. Mesopredators often reach unusually high densities near human habitation, both due to food subsidies (garbage, bird feeders, and livestock grain) and mesopredator release. Domestic predators. Assesses the effect of domestic predators (primarily housecats) due to development. Both pet and feral housecats kill large numbers of birds and small mammals. Invasive plants. Assesses the effect of non-native invasive plants. Invasive plants often spread from sources in residential and agricultural areas, from humandisturbed areas, and along roads. Invasive earthworms. Assesses the effect of non-native invasive earthworms. In the glaciated northeast, all terrestrial earthworms are non-native. Spreading from agricultural areas, home gardens, and fishing holes, they speed up the nutrient cycle in nearby forests, often greatly affecting understory plants and seedling regeneration.

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Index of Ecological Integrity

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  The index of ecological integrity (IEI) is a measure of relative intactness (i.e., freedom from adverse human modifications and disturbance) and resiliency to environmental change (i.e., capacity to recover from or adapt to changing environmental conditions driven by human land use and climate change). It is a composite index derived from up to 21 different landscape metrics, each measuring a different aspect of intactness (e.g., road traffic intensity, percent impervious) and/or resiliency (e.g., ecological similarity, connectedness) and applied to each 30 m cell (see technical document on integrity, McGarigal et al 2017). The index is scaled 0-1 by ecological system and geographic area, such that it varies from sites with relatively low integrity (representing highly developed and/or fragmented areas) to relatively high integrity (representing large, undisturbed natural areas) within each ecosystem type and geographic area (e.g., Northeast, state, ecoregion, watershed). Consequently, boreal forests are compared to boreal forests and emergent marshes are compared to emergent marshes, and so on for each ecosystem type within the specified geographic extent. It doesn't make sense to compare the integrity of an average boreal forest cell to that of an average emergent marsh cell, because the latter have been substantially more impacted by human activities than the former. Scaling by ecological system means that all the cells within an ecological system are ranked against each other in order to determine the cells with the greatest relative integrity for each ecological system within the specified geographic extent.

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Resiliency metrics: similarity, connectedness, and aquatic connectedness

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  This document describes three resiliency metrics that measure a system’s ability to recover from disturbance or stress, as opposed to the other metrics, which assess sources of anthropogenic stress. Resiliency is both a function of the local ecological setting, since some settings are naturally more resilient to disturbance and stress (e.g., an isolated wetland is less resilient to species loss than a well-connected wetland because the latter has better opportunities for recolonization of constituent species), and the level of anthropogenic stress, since the greater the stressor the less likely the system will be able to fully recover or maintain ecological functions. All three of these metrics are based on assessing the distance from the focal cell to cells in its neighborhood in ecological settings space, as defined by a suite of 24 ecological settings variables. The settings variables are an attempt to capture the geophysical attributes that are primary determinants of ecological systems, e.g., temperature, sunlight, moisture, hydrology, and soils (McGarigal et al 2017). Settings also include several anthropogenic variables, such as development, traffic rates, and impervious surfaces. Ecological distance is low for points that fall nearby in settings space (e.g., two points that are on dry ridgetops with similar soils and climate), and higher for points that are further apart in settings space (e.g., a ridgetop and a valley wetland). Ecological distance is highest between natural and anthropogenic points (e.g., the ecological distance between a forest and a point in the middle of an expressway is extremely high, despite any similarities in landform or climate). Note that ecological distance is unrelated to physical distance (although two points that are nearby are more likely to share similar ecological settings).

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Salt Marsh Ditching Metric

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  The majority of salt marsh ditches in the Northeast have been ditched, both to facilitate harvest of salt marsh hay and to control mosquitoes (Smith and Niles 2016). Ditching changes the hydrology and flows of sediment and nutrients of marshes in ways that are not well understand, though ditched marshes may have altered invertebrate and shorebird communities, and may be less resilient to sea level rise (LeMay 2007). Marshes with intensive ditching (ca. 10 m spacing) appear to be most strongly affected (Vincent et al. 2013). The salt marsh ditching metric is an element of the ecological integrity analysis of the Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) project (see technical document on integrity, McGarigal et al 2017). Consisting of a composite of 21 stressor and resiliency metrics, the index of ecological integrity (IEI) assesses the relative intactness and resiliency to environmental change of ecological systems throughout the northeast. As a stressor metric, salt marsh ditching provides an index of the relative intensity of ditching in salt marshes. Metric values range from 0 (no effect from nearby ditches) to 1 (severe effect). The metric is based on a custom image analysis process that identifies most ditches in salt marshes throughout the northeast from 1 m LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging)-based DEMs (Digital Elevation Models). The algorithm, uses a kernel to identify local depressions that could be ditches. It then uses a morphological skeletonize algorithm to draw a 1 m-wide line through the middle of depressions, and then uses an original approach, “clockfacing,” to find linear features in these centerlines of depressions and connect disconnected sections. These potential ditches are converted from raster to linear features, and long, fairly straight sections are tagged as ditches. These linear ditches are converted back to a 1 m raster, then to a 30 m raster, with a value indicating ditch density in each cell. Finally, the ditching metric itself measures the intensity of ditches in the neighborhood of each salt marsh cell using a kernel estimator. Funding for this project was provided by the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative and Department of the Interior Project #24, Decision Support for Hurricane Sandy Restoration and Future Conservation to Increase Resiliency of Tidal Wetland Habitats and Species in the Face of Storms and Sea Level Rise.

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  Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Sea level rise metric

  Kevin McGarigal, Brad Compton, Ethan Plunkett, Bill DeLuca, and Joanna Grand

  The sea level rise metric estimates the probability of the focal cell being unable to adapt to predicted inundation by sea level rise (SLR). Whether a site gets inundated by salt water permanently due to sea level rise or intermittently via storm surges associated with sea level rise determines whether an ecosystem can persist at a site and thus its ability to support a characteristic plant and animal community. Based on a sea level rise inundation model developed by USGS Woods Hole (Lentz et al. 2015). The sea level rise metric is an element of the ecological integrity analysis of the Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) project (see technical document on integrity, McGarigal et al 2017). Consisting of a composite of 21 stressor and resiliency metrics, the index of ecological integrity (IEI) assesses the relative intactness and resiliency to environmental change of ecological systems throughout the northeast. As a stressor metric, sea level rise ranges from 0 (no effect from sea level rise) to 1 (severe effect). Sea level rise is only applied to future time steps; for 2010, the value of sea level rise is always zero.