State Project Summaries Overview

Projects are either under way, completed, or in early organizational stages in 40 states (Figure 1). A summary of the status of GAP in each state is given in the next section.

It is critical to understand the GAP state projects as an event in progress having to do with the development of powerful new information about biological resources. The information is not only affecting tools and capabilities but, perhaps more significantly, the process of developing the information is itself catalyzing integration among the cooperating institutions. Important new institutional relationships and structures are now emerging.

Methods of research, planning, and management for natural resources are presently in flux, especially in the disciplines of biology, ecology, and geography. Some of the reasons for this include: social and political conflicts over natural resources; new insights of how natural systems operate; the need for large-area ecological contextual information; capabilities and applications of information technologies now being used as well as the rates of technical improvements; and, the broader and more cooperative manner in how natural resources professionals and their institutions are conducting business in response to shrinking budgets, greater workload, more acute resource problems, and a more polarized public.

The partnerships being built around mutually-developed GAP information are becoming ever more important in today's political climate. As centralized environmental regulation is deemphasized, scientifically sound biogeographic information for managing resources is becoming more important for effective and meaningful decision making.

From the perspective of natural resources institutions at the state level, the development of GAP data is contributing to convergence on a number of technical fronts. For example, the development, acceptance, and application of a standardized taxonomy for natural land cover represent major progress in pro-active biological conservation (Grossman et al. 1994). There has been enormous recent progress on methods for mapping cover types of natural communities (dominant natural vegetation or non-vegetated land-cover types), though it appears that no single method will suffice for all environments (Caicco et al. 1995, Stoms 1994a). There is, increasingly, more common ground on methods for predicting the distribution of native vertebrate species (Butterfield et al. 1994, Edwards et al. 1995). And much experience has been gained in the mapping of areas that are managed for biodiversity (Beardsley and Stoms 1993). Although some issues remain, such as accuracy assessment or appropriate scale and resolution for analysis, much attention is now being brought to bear on them, and the trends in solving these problems are quite positive.

A framework is now in place for generating, archiving, distributing, querying, and experimenting with biological data that cover large areas at the species, community, landscape, and continental levels. The dynamic and institutional capabilities necessary for continued improvement of the science have been set in motion across the natural resources disciplines covering research, planning, and management. Perhaps more significantly though, the process of developing GAP information, as well as the information itself, is catalyzing institutional integration within and among states. The largest effort ever mounted to map the biological resources of the U.S. is evolving cooperatively from the state level. Central to this progress has been the core funding provided by the NBS and the FWS before that. This funding has often been matched with either funds or in-kind services by state cooperators, allowing hundreds of institutions to plan and carry out activities which would not be possible without this collective effort.

The GAP process is demonstrating the tremendous potential of institutional cooperation. However, the lack of follow-through with core funding can result in an intractable condition when dealing in a multi-organizational dimension.

Figure 1. Current status of GAP projects.