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Director's Corner

KEVIN GERGELY
National Gap Analysis Program, Moscow, Idaho

The first thing I would like to say is thanks to everyone who has
been so generous with their time and attention in my first few months
of filling in as leader for the National Gap Analysis Program (GAP).
I can’t say enough about the professionalism that I’ve experienced
as I’ve talked to people working on state projects, and I appreciate
how you’ve helped me get up to speed on the status of your work.
Also, the National GAP staff in Moscow, Idaho, is simply tremen-
dous, and they keep this program moving ahead.

While we are more than 10 years into the process of creating a
national database of biodiversity, a lot of questions remain to be
resolved about the short- and long-term priorities for action. There
are several reasons. One, we have already begun the second gen-
eration of GAP, taking a regional approach in the Southwest, which
brings with it new challenges. Two, many of our partners are tak-
ing a hard look at the GAP products we are developing. They like
what they see but are asking for more—more definition and accu-
racy in the data layers, more species included in the modeling, more
area covered in seamless data coverages. And last, supporters in
Washington, DC, are looking for us to make a big splash, to show
our data in use, in order to generate support to expand the program
in various directions.

With all this going on in the background, it would be easy to get
pulled in several directions. We are trying to take deliberate action
and are working on a five-year plan to make sure we stay on course
for mapping the Lower 48 and find ways to move into the next
generation of GAP that has the additional components our support-
ers and partners are looking for. It couldn’t be more appropriate at
this time to pause and think about where we’ve been with this pro-
gram and where we should try to make it go.

In large part, the first 10 years of GAP were about integrating sci-
ence into a common-sense practice of setting up nature reserves.
The history of reserve identification and design has been widely
discussed in the conservation literature. The basic approach relied
upon philosophical or spiritual ideas of what lands should be pro-
tected. As a society, we value certain places either for their aes-
thetic value or because of some greater, more reverent notion. With
these ideas, we developed systems of parks, refuges, and public
lands that can be held up as a model for the rest of the world.

When you step back and think about it, you realize what a tremen-
dous challenge it was for conservation-minded scientists to try to
improve upon this reserve system. Yet scientific scrutiny requires
us to look past our “common-sense” ideas, and to look for a scien-
tifically credible approach to reserve identification, selection, and
design. In building the GAP program, we have at the same time
adopted a working theory that some level of representation of all
the components of biodiversity in our reserve systems will foster

DIRECTOR’S CORNER

their long-term viability. This has allowed us, as scientific profes-
sionals, to channel our energy into a process of classifying our natural
resources and then checking at various scales how well they are
represented in some form of protected status.

In the first 10 years of the Gap Analysis Program, we have taken
this idea from concept initiation through multiple series of refine-
ments. While we are still learning from the process, we are within
just a few years of having a national database of land cover, verte-
brate species distributions, and stewardship classifications that will
allow for a level of strategic questioning about the management of
biodiversity in this country that was simply not thought of before.

While we seek more scientific integrity in the reserve identification
process, it may be that our common-sense approach will be our
greatest asset in the next 10 years. The GAP business model (as
discussed in the article by Brackney and Crist in this issue), which
involves developing partnerships with academia, research organi-
zations, public land management agencies, and interest groups, has
worked exceedingly well. In some cases, other federal agencies
have struggled to define an administrative model that will move
their agency towards “an ecosystem approach.” The GAP program,
by its nature, has focused on ecosystems, and the administrative
and organizational structure followed logically. It just seemed to
make sense.

This approach should be important in two ways. First, we hope
other federal agencies use and build upon our partnership model.
We are seeing this in the Southwest regional GAP effort, in which
the Bureau of Land Management and the Environmental Protection
Agency hopefully will take large roles. Second, perhaps these teams
will be the focus for generating support for our program from our
Washington, DC, overseers and will be the hub of the network that
gets information out to those who use it. After all, it is really imple-
mentation and use of GAP data that we are ultimately concerned
about.

Michael Jennings and others discuss where GAP should be going
in the next 10 years in their article “GAP: The Next Ten Years.”
Improving our scientific and technical capabilities is a big part of
that vision. They also mention that the vision for the future in-
cludes “an aggressive suite of outreach and extension activities to
ensure that GAP cooperators and clients are able to make full use
of the program’s products.” Much of the discussion today in the
National GAP program is about the best ways to do this. I hope our
project partners will be our greatest asset in this endeavor, and that
the next 10 years of GAP will be as new and as exciting as the last.
With both science and common sense on our side, how can it not
be?