- The Landscape Toolbox, https://www.landscapetoolbox.org/ is managed by the USDA Jornada Research Institute. The Toolbox has a diversity of tools including access to the extremely useful Monitoring Manual for Grassland, Shrubland and Savanna Ecosystems. It also has many training videos explaining standard vegetation measurement protocols, guidance on sampling design, and access to several tools including the Database for Inventory, Monitoring and Assessment (DIMA) and several unique statistical tools.
- The Nature Conservancy’s Conservation Gateway, http://conservationgateway.org. This site contains a diversity of information on conservation planning at the project, landscape, eco-regional, and major habitat scales. The gateway also provides access to several thousand documents on a diversity of conservation topics.
- Patuxent site and software. http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/software.html.
- The U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center maintains a software library for resource managers. Most of the titles are for wildlife research and monitoring, but some (e.g., “Distance”) can be utilized for estimating abundance of plants or physical phenomenon.
Ecological modeling:
- Vensim is a powerful, free software package that enables the development of state-transition and other stock/flow models. http://www.vensim.com.
- Stella is a state-of-the-art software for developing complex ecological models–the current model of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem was developed using Stella. http://www.iseesystems.com/softwares/Education/StellaSoftware.aspx
- Miradi is an open-source conservation planning software. It also provides a “Rosetta stone” document that compares the conservation planning protocols developed by all the large conservation organizations. https://www.miradi.org
- NatureServe. www.natureserve.org.
- NatureServe, the publisher of this handbook, is, among other things, a consortium of state programs. This NatureServe Explorer website (https://explorer.natureserve.org/) provides a diversity of information on species, natural communities, and ecosystems, including guidance on assessing species’ viability and ecosystem integrity.