Engaging Regional Stakeholders in Scenario Planning for the Long-Term Preservation of Ecosystem Services in Northwestern Virginia

Abstract

This case study describes the application of a framework for developing stakeholder-driven scenarios of the future. The purpose of these scenarios is to inform land use planning toward the protection of ecosystems and derivable ecosystem services in Northwestern Virginia. We held two scenario development workshops with regional experts in conservation, agriculture, land use planning, policy, and economic development to create scenarios of land use in the northern Piedmont and northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. We structured the workshops around a framework that guided stakeholders through several steps eventually resulting in four unique scenarios describing the region in 50 years. Scenario narratives were defined by the intersection of highly influential and uncertain drivers of change relevant to land use planning and ecosystem services. Participants from the northern Shenandoah Valley region selected population growth and climate change adaptation as their scenario defining drivers, while participants from the northern Piedmont region selected planning strategy and climate change impact as their scenario defining drivers. Participants fleshed out scenarios into descriptive narratives that incorporated qualitative and quantitative measures of change. Details from the scenario narratives informed land use change models to further quantify tradeoffs between land use planning decisions and ecosystem services. Individuals interested in using scenario planning to guide research efforts, conservation, or land use planning, or even to broaden perspectives on how to view the future, will find value in this case study.

Projecting Mammal Distributions in Response to Future Alternative Landscapes in a Rapidly Transitioning Region

“…Contemporary biodiversity data provide valuable snapshots of mammal distributions, but they have not been applied to projections of land cover change to forecast community distributions in the future. These predictions would be informative to stakeholders, as they coordinate and select planning policies to preserve biodiversity and their associated ecosystem services.We projected changes in a suite of habitat-relevant land cover types for a rapidly changing landscape in northern Virginia under four different scenarios that varied in policy to plan development strategically (e.g., urban centralized) or reactively (e.g., sprawling) over the next 50 years, while accounting for differences in the rate of human population growth [19]. Scenario planning is a strategic planning approach whereby alternate storylines or "scenarios" of the future are generated and their potential impacts are examined.…”

“…Scenario planning is particularly useful in the conservation realm because of the high degree of uncertainty associated with future changes and the potential for significant impacts resulting from divergent policies [20,21]. This study used scenarios that were developed with regional stakeholders' inputs to increase their relevance to the projected future landscapes [19].We used wildlife detections, obtained through deployments of camera traps along a large-scale urban-to-wild gradient in northern Virginia, to create occupancy models to estimate land cover effects on those mammals detected. We predicted that species such as the American black bear (Ursus americanus) and bobcat (Lynx rufus) would respond negatively to human development and be most sensitive to habitat loss, because they are large omnivorous and obligate carnivores, respectively, which require substantial suitable habitats to persist.…”

“…">Study AreaOur study area was a 32,500 km 2 region of northern Virginia centered on the Shenandoah National Park. This area included the 15 counties plus a 5 km buffer that formed the core study area of the Changing Landscapes Initiative (CLI), a collaborative program initiated in 2015 to guide regional planning efforts with the goals of long-term preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services [19,22]. Roughly 55% of the study area is forested.…”

“…We projected changes in a suite of habitat-relevant land cover types for a rapidly changing landscape in northern Virginia under four different scenarios that varied in policy to plan development strategically (e.g., urban centralized) or reactively (e.g., sprawling) over the next 50 years, while accounting for differences in the rate of human population growth [19]. Scenario planning is a strategic planning approach whereby alternate storylines or "scenarios" of the future are generated and their potential impacts are examined.…”

“…Scenario planning is particularly useful in the conservation realm because of the high degree of uncertainty associated with future changes and the potential for significant impacts resulting from divergent policies [20,21]. This study used scenarios that were developed with regional stakeholders' inputs to increase their relevance to the projected future landscapes [19].…”