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_posts/2019-03-07-Hot off the press: An online guide to help you use the Southeast Blueprint

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+_by Hilary Morris, User Support and Communications for the Southeast and South Atlantic Blueprints_
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+_Southeast Blueprint Version 3.0 identifies high value areas for conservation and restoration across the Southeast and Caribbean._
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+A new online user guide is now available to help you use the Southeast Blueprint to bring in new resources and inform decision-making! A companion guide is also available for the South Atlantic Blueprint, for uses within the South Atlantic subregion of SECAS. This post will focus on the Southeast guide, but the two documents are very similar. If you want to learn more about the South Atlantic guide, check out this blog post on the South Atlantic website.
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+The user guide compiles many different examples of Blueprint uses to provide new ideas about how to connect to this larger strategy. Blueprint staff have been helping individuals and organizations in the conservation community use the Blueprint for several years now, and want to share what we've learend about the types of approaches, wording, and maps that are most helpful in different situations. The guide showcases detailed case studies, grouped into a few themes that summarize the primary ways people use the Blueprint.
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+So who is this user guide for?
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+It's for anyone who wants more detailed instructions on how to use the Blueprint on their own. As always, staff are here to support you if you want help. But some folks prefer to work independently. If that sounds like you, this guide is intended to help you analyze and interpret the Blueprint, particularly if you need to demonstrate the conservation value of a parcel when writing a grant proposal. That's one of the most common and straightforward Blueprint uses, so we dedicated an entire section to that topic. User support staff generally follow a consistent template for parcel analysis, so we've written out all the steps.
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+It's also for anyone who wants to see concrete examples to help them imagine how a plan like the Blueprint could apply to them. The user guide does more than tell general stories about helping "bring in fire funding" and "identify priorities". It gets into the nitty-gritty details---how users filtered down the Blueprint down to find the piece relevant to their question, how they reported out on urbanization impacts, what complementary datasets helped tell the unique story of their area. If that interests you, check out the case studies at the end of each section. We hope that they will inspire you to use the Blueprint in your work, in ways you may not have thought of before.
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+Of course, the user guide, like the Blueprint itself, is a work in progress. So what are the next steps? We welcome feedback on whether you find it helpful and what other information you might want to see. Would you like a a detailed GIS appendix explaining how to analyze raster datasets? More case studies? Something else? I'll be walking through both the Southeast and South Atlantic user guides on [a webinar on March 21st at 10 am](https://www.southatlanticlcc.org/event/third-thursday-web-forum-an-online-guide-to-using-the-southeast-and-south-atlantic-blueprints/). We'll allow plenty of time to discuss future improvements. Or, you can always contact me directly to share your thoughts at hilary_morris@fws.gov or 919-707-0252.
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+Another longer-term next step---the Southeast Blueprint has many different subregional inputs. We hope to eventually release guides for each of those inputs, not just the South Atlantic Blueprint, to help you get the most out of all the underlying data.