Hello, my name is Joe Lemeris. I'm a GIS and data manager for the South Carolina Department
of Natural Resources. I specifically work in our heritage trust program, dealing primarily
with managing our data for rare, threatened, and endangered species in South Carolina.
GIS is a type of software that a lot of people use. Most people think of GIS as something to
the effect of google maps, and google is a type of GIS; It's one that allows you to figure out
where you are and how to get to where you want to go, but GIS can also be used across a number
of different sectors. In our case, we use GIS to identify places in South Carolina that are
important to species of concern and figure out the best ways to protect those places so that they'll
persist into the future. So here we have a portion of South Carolina, and you can see in
the map here we have aerial imagery, we have state boundaries and a few city names and roads here,
but we also have some points, green and red, and these locations are areas where we track species
of concern, plant, and animal, and these are just point locations and sort of areas where we know
species are found. Here's an example of using a data set that we have compiled areas where
Carolina bays are known to be found in the state. Carolina bays are a unique geologic feature that
are also very important to a number of different species of reptile and amphibian as well as
plants. Here's an example of a predictor variable that we use to identify certain areas that might
be important to species. It's called the NDVI or normalized difference vegetation index. It's
a measure of how vegetated a certain area is, and you can see here areas in red are very open
and do not have much vegetation, whereas areas in green have a larger proportion of vegetation in
those areas. I showed our species data a little bit earlier, and this data is collected from
our agency only within the state of South Carolina, but the natural heritage program
is part of a nationwide and continent-wide network which feeds into a network program
called Nature Serve and Nature Serve acts as the sort of hub for all the heritage programs
across the United States and Canada, and they have been able to use this data to provide
more contiguous data sets such as this map of biodiversity importance or MOBI as they like to
call it which highlights some of these rare threatened and endangered species and where
those are found on a range-wide scale. So you'll see in this particular map that areas
that light up in yellow and orange are areas that have the highest number of potential imperiled
species within the country or region compared to some of the lower areas uh in blue and purple.
It was great to be able to show off some of the stuff that we've been able
to work on over the past several years. Myself, I really enjoy being a GIS manager specifically for
the heritage program because I have a background in biology and have a lot of experience working
with species in the southeast, and it's a really exciting field um lots of technological changes
are happening at a pretty rapid pace so it's becoming easier and easier to be able to
use this data and share it with the people that are making decisions on the ground
you can't protect a species unless you know where it is and what's important to it so this these
tools often are some of the best ways to make sure that that we're focusing our efforts and our
resource dollars to protect the most important places.