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million people. Most of this population is concentrated in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, with substantial growth in nearby Tucson and Prescott. These communi- ties are expected to merge into a single large “mega- politan,” termed the Arizona Sun Corridor (Figure 1). Population growth models indicate that the number of Arizona residents will reach 16 million by 2050. Such rapid human expansion leaves an indelible mark on Arizona’s landscape. Natural open spaces have been converted through the development of communities and agriculture, requiring a vast gray infrastructure to meet increased transportation and utility demands. Each development results in habitat loss that can be categorized in one or more ways: • Habitat destruction from the transformation of land from a natural state to one that’s significantly altered and often inhospitable to its original occupants. • Habitat fragmentation in which a single block of land is divided by a barrier to animal movement into two or more disjuncted pieces of land. • Habitat degradation. After a piece of land is converted into develop- ment, it’s difficult to restore natural function. Habitat loss often is cited as the leading factor in biodiver- sity declines—changes in biological composition are affected by the isolation and size of remaining habitat patches, resulting in localized extinctions and a loss of viability for whole species. Although some animals can navigate through or over non-habitat, many depend on uninterrupted access to required resources, such as food, water, cover and mates. Planning Tools Species and Habitat Conservation Guide As part of the 2010 State Wildlife Action Plan revi- sion for Arizona, a model was created depicting areas of wildlife-conservation potential. Using ArcGIS (ArcInfo with Spatial Analyst) software, processing was com- pleted at 30-meter cell resolution. This model combined complicated submodels (based on the Southwest Regional GAP landcover dataset finalized by USGS in 2004) representing the modeled distributions of a richness index for the state’s Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN); the economic impact of sportfish and Species of Economic and Recreational Importance; and ripar- ian areas—a crucial habitat type in Arizona. The final submodel is unfragmented blocks of land, weighted according to the diversity of the vegetation classes within the block and the percentage of the state’s total area of each vegetation type contained within that block. These five submodels create a base model that AGFD calls the Species and Habitat Conservation Guide (SHCG), which shows multiple shades of blue ranging from areas of low to high wild- life conservation potential. Geospatial Planning Tool and Online Environmental Review Tool Along with development of the SHCG model depict- ing conservation potential across Arizona, an ArcGIS Server data viewer was built using the Flex API. This Geospatial Planning Tool allows users to navigate through the hundreds of datasets that went into the final SHCG model, including the individual species- distribution models included in the SGCN richness submodel, each of the other submodels and the final SHCG model itself. Figure 1. Wildlife movement across the Arizona Sun Corridor (shown in brown) likely will become significantly restricted. Black lines indicate current barriers to wildlife movement, such as canals, major roads, railroads, housing and the border fence. JUL Y 2O11 / WWW . GEOPLA CE . COM 15