The Friends of Conte Atlas
A Forum, Foundation, and Framework to Benefit Wildlife, People, and Environmental Quality in the Connecticut River Watershed
In 2005, a small group of committed partners formed the Friends of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, a unique coalition of over 70 public and private organizations and individuals who provide a forum, foundation, and framework to forge partnerships that benefit wildlife, people, and environmental quality in the Connecticut River Watershed. For the last 18 years, the Friends have worked cooperatively with the Conte Refuge and local communities on land, water, and trail projects that are the most timely and critical, under their shared goal of strengthening the health of the Connecticut River watershed and the communities that live in and are served by it.
To strengthen the partnership with our members and introduce people to their watershed, The Friends have created this collection of maps and data to visualize the many attributes of the Watershed. Additionally, we wanted to connect our partners with authoritative, open data that could be easily utilized in their own analyses of the Watershed.
PAD-US Database of Protected Land
PAD-US is the USGS's official national inventory of American terrestrial and marine protected areas dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity and other natural, recreation, and cultural uses.
Within the Connecticut River Watershed, PAD-US includes over 27,000 polygons with an array of attribute data as recent as July, 2022.
Citation:
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Gap Analysis Project (GAP), 2022, Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) 3.0: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9Q9LQ4B .
Native Land Digital
Native Land Digital is an Indigenous-led, open-sourced, project that maps Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages. As conservation partners, it is important to develop a platform where Indigenous voices can be heard Indigenous communities can represent themselves. Native Land Digital advises that these maps should be treated as a starting point, and encourages organizations to do their own research while engaging with communities and history.
Within the Connecticut River Watershed, Native Land Digital has mapped 20 unique Indigenous territories.
Forests to Faucets
Forests to Faucets is a geographic analysis conducted by the US Forest Service that identifies watersheds that are most important to surface drinking water consumers. The entire dataset includes a plethora of information, but here we showcased Forests to Faucets' "Ability to Produce Clean Water" (APCW) measurement by subwatershed. The APCW is an index that integrates the percent natural cover, percent agricultural land, percent impervious cover, percent riparian natural cover, and mean annual water yield of each watershed.
Impervious Surfaces
Combining subwatershed data from Forests to Faucets and raster data from USGS' National Land Cover Database (NCLD), we wanted to showcase the percent and area of impervious surfaces in the Connecticut River Watershed per subwatershed.
Citation:
Dewitz, J., 2023, National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2021 Products: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9JZ7AO3.
Harvard Forests Environmental Justice Criteria
This dataset was created to identify disparities in land protection according to metrics of social marginalization and assess how incorporating environmental justice criteria into land conservation prioritization systems might change conservation priorities. Harvard Forest identified Environmental Justice Focus Areas as census tracts that are in the lowest quartile of income and protected land within 1 kilometer of the tract, and highest quartile of percent people of color and percent language isolated within each state.
In this map, Environmental Justice Focus Areas are symbolized in bright yellow with a thick black boundary.
Citation:
Sims, K., Lee, L. G., Estrella-Luna, N., Lurie, M., Thompson, J. R. 2022. Environmental justice criteria for new land protection can inform efforts to address disparities in access to nearby open space . Environmental Research Letters 17: 064014.
US Land Value
This Boston University "Places Fair Market Value" dataset displays land values across the United States at the parcel level based on a variety of variables from their 2020 study.
Understanding and visualizing land value and has potential for use in suitability models to determine potential for future land acquisitions.
The Nature Conservancy's Resilient Sites
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has mapped a network of landscapes across the United States with unique topographies, geologies, and other characteristics that can help withstand climate impacts. Along with providing a safe haven for nature to thrive, resilient sites also benefit people through providing clean drinking water and carbon storage to combat climate change.
The Nature Conservancy's Resilient and Connected Network
Along with suitable habits where species can escape climate impacts, TNC has mapped "natural highways" that connect and allow movement between climate resilient landscapes.
National Land Cover Database
To help familiarize people with the Connecticut River Watershed, we have included land cover data from the National Land Cover Database.