America 2050 is calling on landscape conservation practitioners and interested citizens to take the Landscape Conservation Tools Survey. The survey is intended to inform our efforts to create web tools for people working to protect and conserve large natural areas of open space, scenic beauty, historic significance, or wildlife habitat. The survey includes a list of questions to gauge how people might use a large landscape web portal and should take less than five minutes to complete.

The partners in this effort include: America 2050, Regional Plan Association, The Trust for Public Land, the University of Montana's Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and other members of the Practitioners' Network for Large Landscape Conservation, who are looking at ways to facilitate landscape conservation through on-line tools and websites. 

The California High-Speed Rail Authority has released a business plan for California's statewide high-speed rail program. The business plan makes significant refinements to the previous ridership and revenue projections and cost estimates. The Authority also updated the phasing plan and overall timeline, and established a new funding plan that shows the feasibility of substantial private financing to pay for the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of various segments of the project. The aspect of the business plan that is certain to attract the most headlines is the project's new price tag, which has grown from $43 billion to 65.4 billion in 2010 dollars, or $98.5 billion when accounting for inflation over the life of the project.

The business plan also includes a detailed analysis of what it would cost California to accommodate the same amount of growth in travel without high-speed rail - $171 billion over the next 40 years to pay for 2,300 lane miles of new highway capacity, 115 new airport gates, and 4 new runways. With high-speed rail in California, the business plan estimates that the system's construction will generate 100,000 jobs within the first 5 years, and 1 million jobs over time.