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Executive Summary

The Gap Analysis Program (GAP) is a cooperative effort to map natural land cover, vertebrate species, and the lands that are managed in ways that maintain biological diversity. The purpose of Gap Analysis is to identify the "gaps" in our network of conservation lands regarding land cover habitat types, as well as individual vertebrate species, and to build partnerships around the development and application of this information.

Funded Gap Analysis projects are either under way, completed, or in early organizational stages in 40 states. There are requests for project start-ups in the remaining states as well as Puerto Rico and several Latin American and European countries. Thirty-one refereed journal articles have been written on the results of various Gap Analysis projects; fourteen of these have been published in the past two years, including one CD-ROM. At least 40 more journal articles are in press at the time of this writing.

Under the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC), GAP joined with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to make a joint purchase of Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite images covering all of the contiguous 48 states. This joint purchase saved the government millions of dollars in direct costs as well as an estimated 30 million dollars in combined program costs. The MRLC also resulted in an agreement to have the USGS provide all satellite image pre-processing, archiving, and distribution at significant additional savings to the program and increased the comparability of the final map products created by individual researchers.

Staff members participated on the Federal Geographic Data Committee's Vegetation Subcommittee to help with the development of federal standards for natural land cover types. They also worked with The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service Mapping Program to ensure comparability of land cover classification.

Over the past two years, GAP investigators pioneered the development of airborne video for labeling land cover maps and assessment of map accuracy. Workshops on accuracy assessment of both the land cover maps and the vertebrate distribution maps were held to develop guidelines for the state projects. Using these guidelines and other methods, GAP investigators in Utah, California, Idaho, and Massachusetts conducted some of the first accuracy assessments of large-area regional land cover and animal species maps. Additionally, the first independent validation of gaps was conducted in California. Gap Analysis researchers have been field-testing hypotheses of vertebrate models and determining which life history characteristics are needed to improve modeling the distributions of species.

Guidelines for conducting an aquatic Gap Analysis project were developed and a draft aquatic GAP manual developed. A pilot aquatic GAP project was begun in New York to test methods and assumptions.

Two external peer reviews of Gap Analysis were conducted, the first chaired by Dr. Ervin Zube of the University of Arizona, and the second under the auspices of the National Council of the Paper Industry for Air and Stream Improvement, Inc. (NCASI). Both reviews provided evaluations of and guidelines for the program. Both of these critical reviews recognized GAP as a valuable tool.

GAP investigators edge-matched the California, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington land cover maps. Other investigators are currently rendering a unified land cover map of the four-state Mojave Basin ecoregion and of the six-state Great Basin ecoregion. Results to date indicate minor differences relating to variability in the labels used for the original maps.

Maps, reprints, manuals, and other GAP-related information are available over the Internet for Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming at http://www.gap.uidaho.edu/gap. There is an average of about 16,000 queries per month to the GAP home page.

There have been more than a hundred uses made of the GAP data sets in the last two years. Some of the categories of uses include wildlife management, county planning, land use planning by private corporations, basic research, generation of options for large-area designations, and environmental assessments.

Utah State University, in partnership with the National Biological Service (NBS), the USGS, and the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), published the Utah GAP data set on a CD-ROM. Plans are under way to develop similar products for California, Arkansas, and Washington in a user-friendly, menu-driven format for use on a personal computer.

Educational outreach programs using GAP data include "NatureMapping," developed in Washington State, which has involved some 340 classroom teachers. NatureMapping provides instructional guidelines for teachers on collecting field data, specifically designates educational software for data entry, database building, and instructional video and professional support through local planning offices, Audubon Society chapters, and the Senior Environmental Corps.

Among the workshops conducted by GAP over the past two years are map accuracy assessment, aquatic GAP, standards for reporting data and project results, integration of socioeconomic data, and state-level biodiversity planning. The Gap Analysis Program also co-hosted a symposium with the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

The following report provides a detailed review of these and other accomplishments by the Gap Analysis Program over 1994 and 1995.