Products

This section presents the existing geographic data, publications, news articles, the GAP home page, and meetings, symposia, and workshops that have resulted as GAP products. Not accounted for here is the effect GAP is having on building institutional relationships around information. Although the results from the GAP state-level partnerships are easily of equal value to more tangible products such as data, the products resulting from better integrated institutional relationships are more complex, more difficult to quantify, and require a great deal of time and effort.

Meetings, Workshops, and Symposia

1994 GAP Annual Meeting

The Fourth Annual GAP Investigators' meeting was held July 18-22 in Silverdale, Washington, hosted by the Washington Gap Analysis Project. Over 150 persons attended. There were 30 oral presentations and 28 poster presentations covering, for example:

  • Application of GAP data sets to environmental and land use management issues
  • Educational outreach programs
  • Integrating socioeconomic data sets with the land cover
  • Vertebrate distribution maps
  • Aquatic GAP
  • Building partnerships
  • Status reports from seven states
  • Presentation of results of the external peer review of GAP
  • Administrative logistics
  • Budgets
  • Derivative products of vegetation mapping
  • Implementation and dissemination of GAP data sets
  • Break-out session for regional meetings among GAP state project staff.

1995 GAP Annual Meeting

The Fifth Annual GAP Investigators' meeting was held August 7-9, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, hosted by the Arkansas Gap Analysis Project. Some 140 individuals attended and sessions included:

A workshop for new state Gap Analysis projects, covering 30 separate topics, including training for new image interpretation software and airborne video acquisition

  • Configuring GAP data for biodiversity planning
  • Vegetation mapping
  • Vertebrate modeling
  • Metadata
  • Data analysis for conservation gaps
  • Data applications: Case studies
    Utah wilderness issue
    Sierra Nevada Environmental Planning project (SNEP)
  • Poster session (37 exhibits)
  • State partnerships and cooperators
  • Metaprojects
  • MRLC: The TM experience and the potential
  • A vision for the next generation of land cover mapping for the U.S.
  • NBII and the vision for state data nodes
  • Profiles of emerging state biodiversity planning:
    Tennessee Biodiversity Project
    Arizona BIOTA
    Oregon Biodiversity Project
  • Status of the national land cover classification system
  • The NBS/NPS Vegetation Mapping Program: Opportunities for Cooperation
  • Regional GAP break-out sessions.

Additionally, those attending the meeting identified 13 items for action before the next meeting.

1) Review the manual guidelines for modeling prediction of vertebrate distribution. A working group will review and revise the guidelines.

2) Utah and Montana researchers have developed algorithms for aggregating the land cover maps from 30 m pixels to 100 hectare polygons. Fred Limp of the Arkansas project will compare and contrast the two and make a recommendation for a national algorithm to be used by the GAP project.

3) Idaho, Utah, and Massachusetts have all developed accuracy statements of their vegetation maps, and guidelines for accuracy assessment are detailed in the GAP Handbook. However, more work is needed. A workshop will be held to develop one standard technique for accuracy assessment.

4) There is a need for a standard technique for pattern delineation and polygon identification of land cover maps. GAP researchers have been at the cutting edge of developing and improving techniques. As a result, there is a much greater chance for identifying a single technique that could be used. A workshop will be convened to review all existing techniques and write a chapter for the manual, detailing the pros and cons of each technique, and to make a recommendation for a single method to be used for future vegetation mapping efforts.

5) The four land management categories used for the Gap Analysis project may be too limited. There is a need to revisit our thinking on land management categories and provide more detailed guidelines for designation of land use categories. NM-GAP developed a dichotomous key that will serve as a basis for development of new land management categories, and Bruce Thompson will chair a working group to prepare revised guidelines for the GAP manual.

6) A standardized state project final report outline needs to be developed. A working group has developed an outline that will be circulated for comment.

7) Aquatic guidelines: Dr. Pat Heglund of the University of Idaho has developed a draft copy of an aquatic manual for GAP. Mike Jennings presented its contents at the meeting. These guidelines will be revised based on comments received at the meeting and circulated for further review.

8) The GAP Handbook chapter on metadata was revised to include more detailed examples.

9) Regionalization of state land cover maps by Bailey's ecoregions is currently under way for the Mojave and Great Basin ecoregions. New regionalization efforts will focus on the Colorado Plateau, Sonoran, Arizona and New Mexico mountains and semi-desert.

10) A digital copy of the TNC master list of animal names and codes will be distributed to all GAP principal investigators.

11) Several principal investigators (PI's) indicated that they were unable to get a crisp, sharp version of the GAP logo from the GAP Home Page. The logo will be enhanced, converted and distributed to all PI's on a floppy disk.

12) Edge-matching of vertebrate distributions for the different states will be conducted on an ecoregion basis, with the first ecoregion matching done for the Sonoran and Great Basin ecoregions.

13) The Home Page will be reviewed and a variety of new discussion sections set up for regions and topics of interest.

Regional GAP Meetings

During 1994 and 1995, there have been numerous regional meetings of the state Gap Analysis project staff and cooperators. Meetings have been held in the Southwest, Southeast, New England, and Mid-West. These meetings are focused on regional conditions and standardizing methods and data among the state projects. They have resulted in much greater communication among the GAP participants, enhancing the exchange of new technology and methods.

Accuracy Assessment Workshops

As is discussed on page 48 in this report, developing an effective and efficient method for accuracy assessment of GAP land cover data is critical. To this end, GAP held a workshop February 3-4, 1994 on developing guidelines for assessing the accuracy of GAP land cover data. The results of this workshop can be found in the section of the GAP manual on accuracy assessment (Stoms et al. 1994). This subject area requires further research and development, particularly in terms of developing methods that are within the financial means of Gap Analysis state projects. This workshop was a productive first step, and it will be followed by others in collaboration with the MRLC partners.

Although traditionally ecologists and biogeographers have not attached statements of accuracy to species range maps, it is widely recognized that doing so is necessary for all GAP products. In January 1994, a workshop was held to develop a standard method for assessing the accuracy of vertebrate species maps. The results from this workshop are reported by Cassidy et al. (1994) and discussed in this report.

State Biodiversity Programs Meeting

On June 28-30, 1995, the Biological Resources Research Center, University of Nevada/Reno and the Defenders of Wildlife hosted a meeting to establish communication among leaders of the statewide biodiversity programs. This was a professionally facilitated meeting drawn from four presentations by social scientists, planners, and geographers. Representatives from each of the ongoing statewide biodiversity planning programs along with representatives from the NBS State Partnership Program and GAP attended. This meeting resulted in a significant exchange of information and methods among the state programs. It served to expand communication among the NBS State Partnership Program, GAP, and others.  The broader issues of, and approaches toward, statewide planning for biological conservation were brought into a sharper focus.

The Aquatic Component of Gap Analysis Workshop

On September 7 and 8, 1994, the national Gap Analysis Program conducted a workshop to develop an aquatic GAP data layer. The workshop was attended by scientists, planners, and administrators having expertise in aquatic ecology, biogeography, and project implementation. This meeting covered goals and objectives, spatial framework, geographic scale, thematic coverage (taxa), standard attributes, resource management classification and categories, integration with terrestrial data, and pilot project design. The workshop resulted in the existing framework for the aquatic component for Gap Analysis which is described in this report.

GAP Symposium: American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS)

This symposium was invited by ASPRS and held concurrently with the society's annual convention from February 27 - March 2, 1995. It resulted in a book manuscript that will be published by the society (Scott et al. in press). The chapters of the book are:

The promise of Gap Analysis for understanding biodiversity - Mark Shaffer;

The need for a hierarchical approach to conservation - J. Michael Scott and Gerry Wright;

Recent developments in ecological theory: Hierarchy and scale - Robert O'Neill;

A spatial analytical hierarchy for Gap Analysis - Frank Davis and David Stoms;

Hierarchial Gap Analysis for identifying priority areas for biodiversity - Blair Csuti and Ross Kiester;

Extending Gap Analysis to include socioeconomic factors - Deborah Forester, Gary Machlis, and Jean McKendry;

Land use and land cover mapping in the United States: An overview and history of the concept - Katherine Lins and Richard Kleckner;

Today's land cover mapping - Leonard Gaydos;

Mapping units: Their classification and nomenclature for Gap Analysis land cover data - Michael Jennings;

Multiresolution land characterization: Building collaborative partnerships - Thomas Loveland and Denice Shaw;

Mapping deciduous forests in southern New England using aerial videography and hyperclustered multi-temporal Landsat TM imagery - Dana Slaymaker, Katherine Jones, Curtice Griffin, and John Finn;

A protocol for satellite-based land cover classification in the Upper Midwest - Thomas Lillesand;

Accuracy assessment: A critical component of land cover mapping - Russell Congalton;

Mapping animal distribution areas for Gap Analysis - Blair Csuti;

Predicted vertebrate distributions from Gap Analysis: Considerations in the designs of statewide accuracy assessments - William Krohn;

Modeling predicted vertebrate distributions: Potential problems in constructing the models - Kimberly Smith and Donald Catanzaro;

Predicting distributions for vertebrate species: Some observations - Larry Master;

Gap Analysis partnerships for mapping the vegetation of Arkansas - Robert Dzur, Michael Garner, Kimberly Smith, and Frederick Limp;

The application of Gap Analysis to National Parks System planning - Gerry Wright;

Using Gap Analysis data for statewide biodiversity planning: Case studies of applied Gap Analysis for planning of land use and biological resources - Sara Vickerman;

Applications of Gap Analysis data in the Mojave Desert of California - Kathryn Thomas and Frank Davis;

Use of Gap Analysis in regional planning in southern California - Richard Crowe;

Ecoregion and biogeoclimatic ecosystem classifications applied to Gap Analysis in British Columbia using GIS - P.A. Murtha, J. Maedel, and J. Morrison;

Data access: A National Biological Service overview - Phil Wondra;

Issues of GIS: "Database thinking" and database structure - Allan Falconer, Douglas Wight, Thomas Edwards, Scott Bassett, and Collin Homer;

Emerging technologies: Digital aerial photographyCAn overview - Teuvo Airola;

Land cover mapping with Spectrum - Susan Benjamin, James White, Danielle Argiro, and Kevin Lowell;

Compiling a Gap Analysis electronic encyclopedia for the World Wide Web - Brian Biggs and Ashbindu Singh;

A perspective on current trends in conservation, GAP, and a vision for the future of biodiversity managed areas - Jack Estes.

Socioeconomic Factors and Biodiversity Workshop

On February 25-27, 1994, a workshop entitled "Socioeconomic Factors and Biodiversity: An Advanced Research Workshop" was conducted by Dr. Gary Machlis (Machlis et al. 1994) at Semiahmoo, Washington. The goal of the workshop was to stimulate further development of the Gap Analysis technique relative to the integration of socioeconomic factors.

Eighteen participants were invited, representing the fields of biology, ecology, geography, human ecology, and sociology. For three days at Semiahmoo, Washington, the group discussed the challenges facing the research, development and use of GAP products, focusing on ways to advance the overall technique to include the human dimension.

Workshop on Standardizing State Project Final Reports

To facilitate the transfer of GAP information among states, final project reports should be comparable. In September 1995, a two-day workshop was held to develop such a standard final report format. The workshop resulted in establishment of a format for reporting:

  • baseline data (land cover, vertebrate species, land management),
  • analyses based on land management,
  • a synthesis of conservation opportunities,
  • assessment of data accuracy,
  • assumptions and limitations to the data, and
  • further analyses and research and development needs.