Virtual workshops to review the latest version of the Southeast Conservation Blueprint are coming later this fall! Please mark your calendars for the 3-week stretch from Oct 22-Nov 7. Registration links will go out in the SECAS newsletter next month. If you’ve previously used the Blueprint or participated in its development, you’ll also get a direct email invitation.

You might be thinking, “Hey, aren’t workshops usually held in the spring?” If so, you’re right–historically, they have been. In the past, staff held workshops midway through the Blueprint revision cycle to get input on a draft of the latest plan. Then we’d squeeze in as many improvements as we could before finalizing and releasing the Blueprint around October.

The main benefit of having workshops to review a draft was that staff could respond to that feedback right away and fix any serious issues before launching the final Blueprint. But it had a number of drawbacks as well:

• The workshop draft usually didn’t include corridors because the connectivity models take so long to run
• Because the Blueprint data was still in draft form, folks didn’t have the indicator spatial data and documentation or the Blueprint Explorer available to help them understand what’s driving the priorities
• Staff had to run the Blueprint twice in every revision cycle–once for the workshop draft, and once for the final version–which takes time that could be spent on improving the indicator data or Blueprint methods

Staff always ask for feedback on how to improve workshops, and in both 2022 and 2023, we consistently heard that folks wanted the indicator data available to help inform their review. “Why is this a priority?” and “What data is this based on?” are definitely two of the most common questions we hear during workshops. In response to that, we are moving the timing of workshops to after the final Blueprint release! That will ensure everyone has access to the full suite of data and documentation to help them understand what data we’re using and why an area scores high or low. You’ll be able to review the corridors. And staff had more time this cycle to spend on things like indicator review teams, freeing us up to dive deeper into the underlying Blueprint data and approaches.

The tradeoff, of course, is that your feedback on the 2024 Blueprint won’t be incorporated until the next cycle, so you won’t see changes until 2025 at the earliest. However, we never had time to address all the draft Blueprint workshop comments immediately, anyway–staff were always triaging what we could fix in time for the final release. We always ended up adding a number of unresolved comments to the running list of known issues for us to tackle in a later update. And since we still intend to update annually, we hope you’ll find the Blueprint remains responsive to your feedback. Overall, we hope that the new timing of workshops will work better for everyone!

Other than the timing and available resources, you can expect a fairly similar workshop experience–we’re planning on a series of thirteen 1.5-hr virtual workshops via Zoom, held across three weeks in late October and early November. There will be workshops to review Blueprint 2024 across every part of the SECAS geography, including the U.S. Caribbean. We’ll even have a continental Southeast-wide workshop for folks who make decisions at that scale. For now, stay tuned for official workshop invitations and links to register!