Fig 1.
The Western Mojave DRECP study area (California Ecological Subsection 322Ag: High Desert Plains and Hills [30].The remainder of the methods section is organized as follows: a brief explanation of the Zonation conservation software package [24, 25] precedes further detail describing options of the Mojavset offsetting tool. This is followed by a description of our case study site and offsetting decisions, the creation of our set of hypothetical USSED sites, the spatial data describing conservation features, and a description of the two offset analyses analyzed in the case study.
Fig 2.
Map illustrating the use of a utility curve in Zonation.
The colors on both map and chart correspond to regions of protected lands (green), area available for offsets (blue), selected offset sites (darker blue), and areas excluded for offset site consideration (red). Map is for illustrative purposes and does not accurately reflect current availability status.
Fig 3.
Proposed solar development sites.
Western Mojave ecological subsection with species richness and proposed utility scale solar development locations. Species richness is based on SDMs described in Davis et al. [15].
Table 1.
Impact site characteristics from the hypothetical proposed projects.
Table 2.
Species list, summary of modeled solar development impact, and offsets achieved for each species based on Direct vs. Max Cons objectives.
Fig 4.
Direct offset sites (red) for hypothetical solar energy projects (gray) using a 2:1 offset ratio, over modeled species richness.
Fig 5.
Max Cons offset sites (red) for hypothetical solar energy projects (gray) using a 2:1 offset ratio, over modeled species richness.
Fig 6.
The agreement of both scenarios (red), areas chosen by one scenario (orange), over modeled species richness.
Table 3.
Area (ha) in various land status classes for the Max Cons and Direct offset scenarios.