Eleven Governors and four Canadian Premiers participated in the recent Western Governors' Association meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The themes of the meeting included energy, climate change and adaption, wildlife corridors, and water policies. Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal opened the meeting, followed by keynotes delivered by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and NBC News Special Correspondent Tom Brokaw.

Following the keynotes, ESRI President Jack Dangermond spoke during the first plenary session - Protecting Wildlife Corridors in the West. During that presentation ArcGIS Explorer was used to highlight the currently available data and mapping of wildlife habitat and corridors, along with the increasing human footprint. Here's a short overview of the Explorer presentation, highlighting Explorer's capabilities to tell a story with geospatial data.

The side by side screenshots above show the world combined human footprint from the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), a center within the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The CIESIN data has been published via ArcGIS Server, and is show on top of Explorer's imagery basemap. The red areas show the highest combined footprint density.

The screenshots above show the CIESIN data overlain by SERGoM housing density data (courtesy of David Theobald, Colorado State University). The housing density is shown from pale yellow to red, with red being the highest density. The screenshot on the left shows the data for 1940, and the screenshot on the right shows the forecast density for 2030. The area shown is Idaho Falls.

These compare 1940 housing density with the forecast 2030 density for California's Central Valley roughly centered on San Francisco and Sacramento. You can see the density increasing along major highway corridors and on up into the eastern Sierra foothills.

Overlying the Explorer imagery basemap is a layer showing combined habitats for Wyoming. The greater the number of habitats that occur in a given area the darker red the color. On top of the combined habitat map are the abandoned and capped oil and gas wells (red), active wells (yellow), and available leases (blue). Data was provided courtesy of Lynn Scharf, Patrick Comer, and Patrick Crist of NatureServe, and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

Above is a snapshot of an animation that shows the migration of pronghorn antelope as they move from their summer range at the foot of the Teton Mountains to their winter habitat in the Upper Green River Valley, and back again. A number of pronghorn were tracked via radio by Joel Berger and Kim Murray Berger of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The blue dots represent the locations of the pronghorn as they were tracked throughout the year, the yellow dots show the individuals moving from the Teton foothills to the south. The yellow trails show a 3-day travel distance for individuals.

The time series animation of the pronghorn migration was played using the Time Navigator, a custom task developed by Richie Carmichael and available for download at the Explorer ArcScripts sharing site.

These show one of the pronghorn wintering areas. The map on the right includes buffered active wells and lease areas.

Moving to Arizona, the map above shows a section of Highway 260 near Payson. The red areas indicate zones of highest wildlife (elk) kills (data courtesy Sue Boe and Norris Dodd, Arizona Fish and Game Department).

Following an overhaul of the highway and the construction of wildlife underpasses, the dramatic decrease in highway kills can be seen (view the report). Notes were used to link the pictures to their locations.