Map of the Southeast Blueprint in shades of purple with multicolored polygons drawn on top of it, representing spatially explicit workshop comments.
Workshop attendees provided more than 400 spatial comments on the draft version of Southeast Conservation Blueprint 2022.

Thanks so much to all the folks who came to the recent Blueprint 2022 workshops. All the great feedback is going to significantly improve this and future versions of the Blueprint. If you want to learn more about who came, check out Hilary’s blog.

We got more than 400 spatial comments on the draft version of Southeast Conservation Blueprint 2022. Some were questions, some were underprioritized or overprioritized areas, and others were places that looked good. Those comments, and others in the workshop chat, are guiding what improvements we work on for the Blueprint. We’re hoping to be able to incorporate some of those improvements before finalizing this version of the Blueprint later this year. For things we can’t fix, we’ll document them in the known issues and prioritize them for improvements in next year’s Blueprint.

What improvements are we working on based on workshop feedback? Here’s a taste of a few we’re hoping to get into this year’s Blueprint. This is based both on the workshop comments and the ease of making the update with currently available data. No promises on any of these, but I wanted to give you a sense of things we’re trying.

Improve prioritization of:

  • grasslands (including open forests)
  • working lands in Florida
  • playas
  • restoration opportunities in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley
  • deep-sea coral and hardbottom
  • small islands
  • important areas for bats and salamanders (especially in the Appalachians)
  • important areas for brook trout
  • important areas for lesser prairie chickens

We also scoped out a number of other improvements that will take longer to fix than we have for this Blueprint cycle. We’ll be prioritizing those for next year.

If you weren’t able to attend a workshop and would still like to review and provide feedback on the draft Blueprint, please reach out to Emily Granstaff on the user support team (emily_granstaff@fws.gov) and she’ll set that up for you. Given that post-workshop improvements for this year’s Blueprint are already underway, new ideas will likely go into the update queue for next year.