Director's Corner
Michael D. Jennings
National Gap Analysis Program, Moscow, Idaho
After several years of investment, the Gap Analysis Program, which now includes approximately 500 organizations, is entering a phase of reaping significant benefits. As more and more state projects are completed, major applications of both data and results are surfacing, and the benefits from these applications are considerable. The recent EIS for the newest National Wildlife Refuge, Kankakee, in Indiana, used GAP data. GAP was identified in the Bureau of Land Management’s 1999 Performance Plan as a source of essential biodiversity information. The first systematic assessment of the conservation status of vegetation communities across a huge, multistate ecoregion was completed and reported by Stoms and others (1998). That study identified twenty natural community types as vulnerable to elimination or degradation if intervention is not taken. For many of these communities, federal land agencies can avoid future conservation crises by changing current land management practices. A second multistate analysis covering an even larger region is presented in the article by Gerry Wright and others on page 15.
This year GAP final reports were completed for Arkansas, California, Maine, Montana, and Washington. In 1999 we expect to see at least 10 more final reports. State projects were begun in 1998 in Ohio, Georgia, and North Dakota. Also this year the mission of providing biodiversity conservation assessment moved beyond the existing methods for mapping distributions of vegetation types and each species of amphibian, bird, mammal, and reptile. Important progress was made in developing capabilities for mapping distributions of ant, crayfish, fish, mussel, plant, and snail species.
This departure beyond vertebrate species is significant and defining. GAP has been legitimately criticized that as a biodiversity program, it has not included those phyla that make up most of the diversity of life on Earth. While this is true, there were also good reasons for the strategy that focused on vertebrates when GAP began. Now, however, GAP is beginning to explore and discover how to map distributions of species from some of the 21 phyla other than chordates. While we may set priorities for which life forms to focus on first, at the end of the day, biodiversity is still a package deal. If we are going to be a biodiversity program, achieving conservation through good science and information rather than an interest group for particular life forms, then we must commit to apply principles of gap analysis to all forms of life.
Grasping this bigger picture, however, does not come easily to everyone. The enormous success attained by GAP resulted this year in an attempt to start a separate "aquatic gap analysis program." While eagerly embraced at first, it later became clear that this attempt did not share an understanding of biodiversity writ large, nor a cooperative commitment to biodiversity conservation that might truly help break that "land-water" barrier which has plagued the way natural resources management has been traditionally carried out. Sadly, the attempt to create a separate program would perpetuate this traditional division of land and water as two separate worlds. One is almost forced to ask, "Are mammals not aquatic?" How could birds ever be separated from water bodies? And reptiles? Amphibians? Debates about where the land ends and the water begins surely go back a long, long way. Most biologists today would agree that for management purposes, it just does not make sense to try to separate life along the humidity gradient. Additionally, one central reason for the greater declines of taxa that depend more strongly on submerged environments (Master et al. 1998) is precisely this historical disjunct between land and water in resource planning, management, and research. To be effective in managing our living resources sustainably, we must use a holistic model to develop information about them. Happily, the decision by the USGS is that there will be only one Gap Analysis Program, and we are getting about the business of applying the principles of gap analysis to other phyla as, of course, the budget will allow (which is another matter).
Pragmatic advances in applying gap analysis to fish, crayfish, mussels, and snails are summarized in the article by Scott Sowa. Scott’s work has begun to show a spatially explicit relationship between community diversity and species rarity that may someday prove to be as significant as principles of island biogeography. Marci Meixler and Mark Bain also provide excellent descriptions of habitat characterization, animal modeling, and analysis for fish species in New York. Craig Allen and colleagues describe their approach for modeling ant species distributions in Florida in quite some depth, and Walter Fertig and colleagues at the University of Wyoming describe how they sorted plant species for gap analysis.
This year The Nature Conservancy delivered formal descriptions of approximately 1,150 vegetation alliances from the Midwest, Southeast, and Southwest. This fundamentally important work is the base line for establishing a credible taxonomy of consistent ecological communities for the U.S. and is the point of origin for the floristic levels of the National Vegetation Classification. Marion Reid of TNC gives us a bird’s-eye view of this in her article on alliance descriptions of the western U.S. Leonard Pearlstine and others from the Southeastern GAP group explain a new approach for standardizing on two different groupings of vegetation alliances for mapping purposes: alliances that consistently occur in tightly interdigitated patterns ("ecological complexes"), and alliances that are similar in composition, where the dominant species that distinguish certain types are in the same genus ("compositional groups," e.g., there are two different Typha alliances distinguished only by the shift in dominance from T. latifolia to T. angustifolia). Their approach promises to solve some of the problems inherent to the "mapping vs. ecology" tension zone.
Also this year GAP completed a successful pilot project on biodiversity decision support systems for county planners and began work on a similar system for National Wildlife Refuge managers. Patrick Crist and Margo Herdendorf give readers a wonderful account of the concepts as well as the implementation of a system that is complex and sophisticated behind the scenes yet straightforward and simple for the user.
These are just some of the innovations that are covered in this year’s GAP Bulletin. All of them represent the erupting science and technology now pouring out of GAP. The huge amount of species habitat modeling promulgated by GAP has resulted in a international symposium planned for next October. To top it off, the GAP web site was recognized by Natural History magazine as one of the top 10 biodiversity web sites in the world. The hundreds of geographers, zoologists, community ecologists, botanists, computer scientists, conservation biologists, and remote sensing experts that make up the GAP community deserve to be proud of our progress and optimistic about the future of conservation.
Literature Cited
Master, L.L., S.R. Flack, and B.A. Stein, editors. 1998. Rivers of life: Critical watersheds for protecting freshwater biodiversity. The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, Virginia. 71 pp.
Stoms, D.M., F.W. Davis, K.L. Driese, K.M. Cassidy, and M.P. Murray. 1998. Gap analysis of the vegetation of the Intermountain Semi-Desert ecoregion. The Great Basin Naturalist 58:199-216.