The Exchange Network is a partnership among states, tribes, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that is revolutionizing the exchange of environmental information. Partners on the Exchange Network share data efficiently and securely over the Internet. The objective of the Biodiversity Data Exchange project is to increase the effectiveness of the New York State Natural Heritage Program (NYNHP), which has the responsibility for collecting, managing, and disseminating information about rare plants, rare animals, and significant ecological communities. The NYNHP shares this information with NatureServe, a nonprofit organization that connects more than 50 Natural Heritage Programs across the country. NatureServe establishes scientific standards for biological inventory and biodiversity data management, develops comprehensive and current databases for at-risk species and ecological communities, and provides information products and conservation services to guide natural resource decision-making.

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has a critical business need to make natural resource data more readily available and accessible to the public and to partners, particularly online. Windsor Solutions developed and implemented a Web-based application using the ArcGIS JavaScript API to provide enhanced access to this natural resource data.

Each year, many millions of dollars are spent in suppressing wildland fires. What is the return on these expenditures? How can we best prioritize dollars spent fighting fires and in fuel reduction projects? The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), General Accounting Office (GAO) and Congress have asked these questions. In response, Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC) has assembled a team of fire researchers and GIS analysts to develop a model to approximate fire risk to highly valued resources - social, economic, and ecological. The model uses outputs from the Fire Program Analysis (FPA) System to estimate burn probability and flame length, and layers of highly valued resources such as power lines, wildlife habitat, and watersheds. The first approximation of the model will be published in a Forest Service General Technical Report (GTR, in review).

The Northwest Gap Analysis Project (NWGAP) is mapping and assessing the biodiversity for the five-state region encompassing Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, and Wyoming. It is a multi-institutional cooperative effort being coordinated by the University of Idaho and the U.S. Geological Survey Gap Analysis Program. The primary objectives of NWGAP are to create detailed, seamless GIS maps of land cover, species ranges and predicted distributions, land stewardship and management status. Additionally, to do a gap analysis to identify species and vegetation communities that lack representation or are underrepresented within the Northwest’s network of conservation lands (i.e., stewardship database), in other words, "gaps".

We are currently updating the NWGAP stewardship database by compiling boundary information as well as management status for federal, state, and locally managed conservation lands. We are also assigning GAP status codes, requesting user feedback prior to the final release, and exploring ways of applying these data to conservation planning. It is nearing completion and will become publicly available during winter 2009. The NWGAP stewardship database will be incorporated into the Protected Areas Database of the US (PAD-US) through the PAD-US partnership.