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NATIONAL NOTES

KEVIN GERGELY

National Gap Analysis Program, Moscow, Idaho

The big news this past year is the GAP budget. A major addition was made to the Department of
the Interior funding bill in the final stages of the appropriations process. This was a compromise
proposal, which was aimed at meeting some of the needs identified in CARA proposals, but at
the same time kept the annual funding under control of the Appropriations Committees, instead
of making it permanent and automatic.

The fiscal year 2001 Interior spending bill included an "authorization" of $1.6 billion for
environmental programs, and it included actual "appropriations" of $1.2 billion towards that
authorized level. This amount is made up of base funding for ongoing programs, totaling over
$500 million, plus a brand-new program called the Land Conservation, Preservation and
Infrastructure Improvement program. Nearly $700 million of new funds were provided for
environmental initiatives, primarily for the major federal lands agencies–the Fish and Wildlife
Service (FWS), the National Park Service (NPS), and the Forest Service (FS).

While the GAP funding increase is a very small portion of a $1.6 billion dollar concept, it has
major implications for us. First, it will speed the completion of the Lower 48 data set, which is
our primary goal. Second, Congress directed us to spend at least $2 million on Gap Analysis of
aquatic resources. Over the past few years, only small amounts of money were spent on aquatic
GAP, but the idea has been extremely popular. Many of our cooperators want to expand their
projects to include similar analyses of aquatic resources. We have struggled to keep a few
prototype projects under way and have been frustrated at the number of requests we have had to
turn down simply because no funds were available. Finally we have an opportunity to do more.

More importantly, I hope this funding increase is a signal that GAP has taken a major step
towards being recognized as a vital component of conservation planning and management.

I remember being asked about the GAP budget at our National Meeting in San Antonio. At the
time, it seemed Congress was likely to approve $500,000 of new funds out of the requested
increase of $4 million. I replied that I believed that the U.S. Geological Survey managers had
shown a great amount of vision to request more than a 100% increase for GAP, because we
certainly needed the funds and could quickly use them for very high priority work. However, I
was not surprised that Congress initially took an incremental, conservative approach. I was
thankful for even a little financial help. I thought there was a big difference between getting a
small operational increase and getting a relatively huge programmatic expansion. The former
took a little commitment on the part of those that knew about GAP and were influential in the
budget process. The latter took a leap of faith. I would like to say thanks to those that had the
faith and helped us get such an increase.

So is this it? Was this last year a major turning point for the Gap Program? Have we received
status and recognition from the policy world? Do we now have our mandate?

Sometimes it seems like the word on GAP has spread everywhere. In this past year, we have
been in contact with scientists from Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, South Africa and Brazil,
and various other parts of the world, all interested in or involved in GAP-like analyses. The
Chinese have taken on a major project to use GAP to identify potential reserves in the Yunnan
Province, and they sent a team of scientists to the States last year for training on developing GAP
data. Our partnership with Mexico to jointly map the Rio Grande region as a means of
technology transfer has also picked up steam this past year. There seems to be commitment to
developing a system of national reserves in Mexico, and several states–including Nuevo Leon
and Tamaulipas–seem ready to invest in GAP for use in reserve identification and selection.

On the other hand, when working with our most likely federal partners, such as the FWS or the
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) we still find a need to do basic education about GAP, what
the program does, and how our data can be incorporated into a comprehensive analysis of
biodiversity. On specific projects, we have some major accomplishments to show. We are
working on a prototype decision support system using GAP data to help the FWS ecosystem
team in eastern North Carolina make decisions about land acquisition and restoration projects.
We are also working on a partnership with BLM and the FS to take regionalized GAP data from
western states and revise them to help evaluate future conservation needs for shrub-steppe
habitats and for long-term protection of the sage grouse. We need to turn these types of projects
into success stories that will help us become better integrated into federal land management.

How can this disparity exist? Are we really world leaders in conservation, having developed an
operational model that is practical, applicable, and a meaningful extension of the core concepts
in the conservation biology literature? Or, are we just a little more data for the mix–one of many
partial solutions to complex conservation problems? How much impact can we make?

The next year or two will tell us much. This program has held together over time. With the end
of this past year, we have fulfilled the long-held vision of getting projects under way in every
state in the Lower 48. The continued hard work of our cooperators is paying off, and it seems
like each day another state is sending us their completed data sets. We have set out a plan in the
National Office to begin regionalizing data sets–something we have known many of our users
want, but that has been just beyond our reach. Now we have received a vote of confidence from
Congress through the appropriations process.

We'll show them, I'm sure, that it is the best money they ever spent!