The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) maintains a large database of wildlife species locations called Collections.  Data from Collections are used for a variety of purposes including:  environmental review, determining species distribution or range, and as input into various models.  The Blue and Green Infrastructure initiatives are projects that use species locations, along with other datasets, to identify water and land areas that are priorities for conservation attention. The INSTAR project, conducted by Virginia Commonwealth Universities’ Center for Environmental Studies, ranks the biological integrity of streams using the variety and abundance of aquatic species present.  VDGIF uses known locations of threatened or endangered species to protect essential wildlife habitat through the state environmental review process.  All of these efforts use wildlife species locations from the Collections database.  The Collections database is primarily available through the VDGIF’s Virginia Fish and Wildlife Information Service (www.vafwis.org), a comprehensive source of wildlife information in Virginia.

This grant provided financial support for entering and digitizing wildlife species locations into the Collections database.  From October 2004 to March 2006, 4914 Collection locations were entered or modified within Virginia’s Coastal Zone.  Within these almost 5000 locations, 13,439 species-locations were recorded (i.e., there was an average of 2.73 species observed at each Collection location).  Over 1200 Collection locations contained one or more species with some type of federal or state listing (e.g. threatened, endangered, species of concern, etc.).

In spring 2005, VDGIF sent all current Collections records to Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation – Division of Natural Heritage for use within the Virginia Conservation Lands Needs Assessment (VCLNA) and thus within the Green-Infrastructure. 

In January 20, 2006, VDGIF sent all current aquatic Collection records to VCU-CES for use within INSTAR and thus within the Blue-Infrastructure.  This dataset included nearly 35,000 species locations containing almost 200,000 aquatic species observations.

The deliverable is a CD containing the latest version Collections data for the Coastal Zone.  This includes a GIS shapefile with all of the Collection locations in the Virginia Coastal Zone.  Collections containing state or federally listed species are offset and buffered to hide the exact location of these imperiled species.  There are almost 24,000 species locations in this dataset.  A separate table list the species observed at each Collection location.  Metadata and instructions for using these datasets together are included.