The Chesapeake Conservancy is pioneering the production of large, high-resolution flow path datasets. Through our partnership with the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP), the Conservancy continues to develop innovative methods to map streams across the landscape using detailed elevation and terrain information together with the Conservancy’s high-resolution land cover. With support from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, The Conservation Innovation Center (CIC) completed the first large-scale enhanced flow path dataset for the Susquehanna watershed in 2016, and has since created flow path data for multiple other geographies.

The enhanced flow path data is providing CBP and partner organizations with the power to practice precision conservation – putting the right practices and the right skills in the right places at the right time – by enabling them to make effective and impactful decisions about where to target their efforts. It has allowed the CIC to not only identify and prioritize restoration and conservation areas, but also to help partners throughout the watershed save time and money implementing Best Management Practices such as forested riparian buffers.

The CIC leverages the combination of the enhanced flow path data and high-resolution land cover data to identify opportunity areas for planting riparian forest buffers within a specified distance of the flow paths. Once these restoration opportunity areas (ROAs) are identified, they can be characterized by the land cover composition and modeled sediment and nutrient loading of the upstream land area that drains through the ROA. The CIC has worked with multiple partner organizations to create tailored prioritizations of potential ROAs that target projects that will result in maximum water quality benefits.