Thanks to Molly Schmidt who works for the Hawaii Legacy Lands Conservation Commission for compiling this excellent list of Resource land acquisition plans and priorites in the of State plans, county plans, and other projects that indicate priorities or policies for the acquisition of lands for the purpose of resource protection.

Great work Mollie. This will be immensely useful for our SWARS.
-Ron

Did you miss the 2009 Hawaii Conservation Conference? Have you heard the latest information on climate change, cultural practices, invasive species, the economic crisis, and where Hawai`i is heading? Do you want to hear from islanders from Hawaii and Micronesia in their own words? Would you like to hear for yourself Dr. Stephen Schneider, Nobel Peace Prize winning climatologist on what can be done to mitigate the effects of climate change and sea level rise. Do you care about these Hawaiian Islands; our people, our biodiversity, our culture, the awesome power of our oceans, volcanoes, coral reefs and traditions?

Then you should check out the HCC presentations. They’re online. And free.

The link for the conference index is http://hawaiiconservation.org/2009hcc_presentations.asp

Or you can get one or all of the podcasts on your itunes. Make sure that you are connected to the internet and that itunes can access the itunes store. In itunes, choose Advanced – then Subscribe to Podcast  and then copy and paste this URL into the dialogue box:

http://hcc09.blip.tv/rss/itunes

The podcast directory will load, and you can download one or more of the presentations complete with abstract (in the lyrics section of the podcast).

Enjoy

Society of American Foresters honor Bob Merriam for 50 years as an SAF member.

This years Hawaii Conservation Conference ”Hawaii in a Changing Climate” was a big success. Mahalo to everyone who helped put this together.

This conference, now in its 17th year, has grown to three intense days plus a Friday field-trip day, four or five concurrent sessions per day, an Open Public Day, an amazing array of posters, lots of great interaction, and the latest news on research, management, and climate change issues relevant to Hawai`i.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Stephen Schneider, a world renound climatologist from Stanford who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and several others for their work in identifying climate change, and for advocating a coordinated response to the impending impacts due to changes in weather, rainfall, and sea level.

Hawaii SWARS had a two-hour session on Public Information Day that was very well attended. Ron (your author) gave the general overview of SWARS; Dr, Kimberly Bennett (University of Hawaii Economist) gave a presentation on the economics of water and complex systems; Teresa Truman-Madriaga presented on the Urban Perspective of SWARS, Darren Johnson; a fire ecologist who assisted with the Hawaii LANDFIRE project presented this brand-new dataset, Dawn Greenlee (US Fish & Wildlife Service) and Glenn Shishido (DOFAW) presented on the latest fire data and how it will be used in Hawaii SWARS.

At the conclusion of our talk, we presented Bob Merriam a placque on behalf of the Society of American Foresters for celebrating his 50th year as an active SAF member.

We got a lot of great feedback and make some powerful new connections with our partners.

And, since Aaron Lowe (DOFAW’s Na Ala Hele program manager for the island of Oahu) and his hot-shot team of multimedia techs were managing the hundred twenty plus powerpoint presentations, we decided to record all of the presentations using Camtasia Studio. Several speakers did not want to be recorded, and a few presentations were not successfully recorded due to technical issues, but we did manage to produce nearly 90 of the conference presentations.

Many of these presentations are of direct relevance to Hawaii SWARS. Not only our own session, but others as well. For example, NOAA is in the process of producing a similar type of plan to SWARS, but specifically geared to the response to climate change in Hawaii. We too, must address this in Hawaii SWARS. So, they held a two hour planning workshop, all of which was recorded.

I have done virtually all of the post production, and it has been quite a learning experience. As soon as the whole conference is up on the web, checked, and an index is created, we will announce the results and you can see for yourself the most current information that we have on research, science, cultural practices, and management of Hawaii’s unique environment and culture.

We are thrilled that LANDFIRE wil be coming to this year’s Hawaii Conservation Conference to present their data and to work with us here to help us intergate these rich datasets into Hawaii’s asessment (SWARS). Without exception, everyone who has worked on this project has been nice, really smart, enthusiastic, interesting and committed . Huge mahalos to everyone on the LANDFIRE and TNC teams. Oh yeah, Jim, Dawn and the rest of the gang have been great too. All good.

It was a small but significant meeting; on Friday April 17 representatives from three of the major agencies with ongoing watershed planning projects met together for the first time at the DOFAW administrative office in Honolulu. We had representatives from DOFAW, the Coastal Zone Management Non-point Source Pollution Control Program, the Hawaii Association of Watershed Partnerships, NOAA Coastal Services Center and the Coral Reef Task Force. The purpose of the meeting was to share information on each other’s project deadlines, deliverables and methodologies, and to begin to coordinate our efforts. Meeting notes will be posted shortly.

Kudos to Jamie Carter from NOAA for bringing together Hawaii SWARS and the Hawaii Coastal Zone Management (CZM) program. This new relationship between DOFAW and CZM will be very beneficial to all of us who love these islands.