Delmarva Restoration & Conservation LSP & Optimization Master Map

LOGIC SCORING OF PREFERENCE METHOD AND OPTIMIZATION MODEL

The first step in realizing the DRCN Strategy was to agree on our Vision for Delmarva, and outline the Goals, Objectives, and Strategies that we will employ to achieve that Vision. Next we identified and mapped the important natural resource characteristics of the landscape in order visualize restoration and conservation priorities. The third step was to use our collective professional knowledge to rank and prioritize land parcels based on those characteristics using a structured decision-making approach known as the Logic Scoring of Preference (LSP) method. The final step in the process was to include funding to further analyze the parcels by using an optimization model to identify a suite of projects that will get us the most natural resource value with a finite budget.

Logic Scoring of Preference Project Methodology

On October 9, 2019, DRCN convened a structured decision-making LSP workshop to help inform its Strategic Restoration and Conservation Action Plan for the Delmarva Peninsula. The LSP method helps ensure that important decision-making criteria are included in the evaluation and that project evaluation is based on the fundamental properties of human reasoning. The LSP method uses “attribute trees” with weightings and logic structures as the organizing method for ensuring that decision support models reflect the desired intent of decision makers.

Once areas have been evaluated for the fish and wildlife habitat, water quality, coastal resilience, and working landscape values, the DRCN partners can identify relevant sources of funding to implement projects within each category and forecast annual revenue amounts for the next few years to set as a “budget” for optimization scenarios. For more information on the LSP method and optimization, see the following journal article and recent book.

Filtering the Parcel Analysis

There are over 755,000 unique parcel PINs totaling over 3.68 million acres in these nine Delmarva counties. Many of these parcels are not suitable for restoration or conservation investments within the focus areas of the Delmarva RCN partners. We removed parcels less than 20 acres and those confirmed to be managed lands under fee simple protection or conservation easements. We used the owner name field in the CoreLogic parcel data that The Conservation Fund uses on a license restricted basis as well as the Protected Areas Database of the US (PADUS) and the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) to reduce the number of parcels analyzed using the Logic Scoring of Preference (LSP) method to only 26,617 – about 3.5% of all parcels, totaling over 1.9 million acres – about 53% of the acreage.

There are still 184 parcels totaling 13,234 acres (less than 1% of the analyzed acreage) with a blank owner name in the parcel database, which usually means they are tax exempt and therefore publicly owned. We have kept them in for GIS analysis purposes for this workshop but would remove those from any future optimization scenarios if we were able to confirm they were already publicly owned and/or protected.

Quick summary of the analyzed parcels in the Delmarva peninsula
 All: 26,617 parcels | 1,913,935 acres | Range: 20 – 1,286 acres
 DE: 8,566 parcels | 564,373 acres | Range: 20-1,141 acres
 MD: 14,653 parcels | 1,133,599 acres | Range: 20 – 1,286 acres
 VA: 3,398 parcels | 215,963 acres | Range: 20 – 1,210 acres
o PADUS in Delmarva: 706,040 acres
o NCED in Delmarva: 451,952 acres

The resulting plan identifies the most important places to protect and restore and describes how the DRCN partners will work together to obtain funding for on-the-ground restoration and conservation investments.