Conservation Biology Institute
The Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) develops and provides special services focused on ecological forecasting and customized decision support tools for a variety of topics including climate change impacts. CBI provides scientific expertise to support the conservation and recovery of biological diversity in its natural state through applied research, education, planning, and community service. CBI utilizes GIS and remote sensing data to conduct assessments and planning in support of conservation projects globally.
CBI conducts research - alone or in collaboration with others - to actively seek creative new ways to address a wide range of ecological problems from endangered species to regional conservation planning. They also develop innovative conservation tools, techniques, and analyses to help organizations, agencies, and companies utilize the best available conservation evidence.
Some of CBI’s major accomplishments include:
Developed an innovative and successful web-based conservation data sharing system called Data Basin.
Spearheading climate change adaptation through practical application of forecasting models (e.g., WWETAC, ARRA, and Data Basin Climate Center)
Provide scientific leadership in planning for forest carnivores in the Sierra Nevada (e.g., Sierra Carnivores project and Yale Framework).
Planning and assessments tools to support ecologically sustainable renewable energy development in Tehachapi Mountains
Researchers and programmers at CBI design spatially explicit modeling approaches to address complex interactions and relationships to help solve conservation problems, including the effects of climate change.
The Environmental Evaluation Modeling System (EEMS) is a tree-based, fuzzy logic modeling system. With EEMS, data from different sources and different numerical domains can be combined to answer questions in areas such as current and future potential habitat value, ecological/development conflict, and landscape vulnerability to climate change.
MC1 is a widely used dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM) that has been used to simulate potential vegetation shifts in California and Alaska, all of North America, and over the entire globe under various climate change scenarios. MC1 was originally designed by a team of Oregon State University scientists in collaboration with the Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State. It is currently maintained and documented by a group of Conservation Biology Institute scientists.
Additionally, CBI is helping to establish a “three zone” climate adaptation strategy, covering three management strategies - restoration, innovation and observation - zoned in large, contiguous areas across the landscape. The Wilderness Society is developing the collaborative conservation strategy and has contracted CBI to help address the spatial challenges about where and how these zones should be mapped on the landscape. The answers are context specific, so CBI is building a spatial decision support system (SDSS) to aid with these questions for any given landscape.
The Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) founded in 1997 in Corvallis, Oregon.
Phone: (541) 757-0687
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