Directing $10 Million in DoD Conservation Investment Through Spatial Analysis
SC Army National Guard | REPI Program | Cowasee Basin, South Carolina
Context
The U.S. military operates one of the largest land portfolios in the country, much of it inside ecologically significant landscapes. Managing that land responsibly requires reconciling two priorities that institutions typically treat as competing: military readiness and environmental protection.
As Environmental GIS Manager for the SC Army National Guard, I managed more than 20,000 acres within the Cowasee Basin -- a UNESCO Biosphere adjacent to Congaree National Park and one of the most biodiverse environments in the southeastern United States. The challenge was structural: urban encroachment threatened both training capacity and ecosystem integrity, and the Department of Defense's Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) program offered a mechanism to address both -- but only where the investment could be justified with defensible spatial evidence.
The Problem
REPI funds are limited and competitive. To direct them effectively, the Guard needed to evaluate hundreds of candidate parcels against multiple, often conflicting criteria: ecological value, proximity to active training operations, development pressure, and long-term land-use compatibility.
Without a structured analytical framework, those decisions default to negotiation and intuition. Parcels get evaluated in isolation. Opportunities are missed. Investments are difficult to defend.
System Design
I designed and built a multi-criteria geospatial decision framework to support conservation easement planning under REPI. The system integrated data from three domains:
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Military: training area footprints, buffer requirements, operational sensitivity, noise, convy routes
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Environmental: habitat classification, species corridors, wetland extent, adjacency to protected lands
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Regional: parcel boundaries, development pressure indicators, land-use trajectories
Each candidate parcel was scored against weighted criteria across all three dimensions, producing a prioritized portfolio that leadership could evaluate through a repeatable, transparent process -- rather than case-by-case advocacy.
The system also created a shared analytical basis across organizations with different mandates: Guard leadership, conservation partners, and state and federal agencies. That common framework was what made coordinated investment possible.
Outcomes
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The analytical framework directed more than $10 million in DoD REPI funding toward conservation easements in the Cowasee Basin. It also established a repeatable process for evaluating future acquisition opportunities -- moving land management from a negotiation problem into a structured decision process.
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Military readiness and conservation were not treated as trade-offs. Spatial analysis made them interoperable: the same model that identified high-value training buffers also identified high-value ecological corridors. Investments that protected one protected the other.
The Broader Point
This work is an early example of what I build now at a different scale: spatial systems that function as institutional infrastructure. Not maps. Not GIS outputs. Decision frameworks that integrate competing priorities, structure evidence, and guide investment across organizations that would otherwise be negotiating blind.
Location data, when properly governed and analytically structured, changes what decisions are possible.