The mission of the Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative is to provide science and technology for conservation planning and action leading to a mutually desired landscape of the future (Nassauer and Opdam 2008, USFWS 2012). An essential component of developing a shared vision is a common understanding of the current land and seascape characteristics. This includes the distribution of Trust resources, the condition of Trust resource populations and their habitats, the governance structure impacting them, assessments of threats and vulnerabilities – tied to information on land uses, climate, ecosystem characteristics (e.g., stream flow), and potential future scenarios (Strategy 2012). This is a potentially overwhelming amount of data to collect and synthesize, thus there is clear need to (1) reduce this complexity through the identification and use of shared surrogate species (USFWS & USGS 2006, Wiens et al. 2008) and other indicators and (2) develop a platform to collate, visualize, and analyze spatially-explicit information.
