A key task was
the development of a seamless land stewardship map for the region.
Through coordination from the
U.S. Geological Survey’s Gap Analysis
Program (GAP)
and the
collaborative efforts of participating state institutions, a
seamless product was completed in September 2005. These data are
made available to the public by the SWReGAP consortium of
institutions responsible for their development.
The two
primary goals of GAP are to provide an assessment of the
management status for certain
elements of
biodiversity (vegetation communities and animal species) throughout
their U.S. range, and to provide land stewards with information on
the representation of these elements on their land so they can make
informed decisions about their management practices regarding biodiversity.
To accomplish this, the mapped
distributions of vegetation communities are compared to a map of
land stewardship. In GAP, the land stewardship map combines
attributes of ownership, management, and a measure of intent to
maintain biodiversity. These comparisons do not consider viability,
but are a start to assessing the likelihood of future threat to
abiotic element from habitat conversion—the most obvious cause
of biodiversity decline (Noss et al. 1995).
We use the term
"stewardship," because legal ownership of a land area does
not necessarily equate to the entity charged with managing the
resource. Though we record the management and ownership entities of
public lands and privately owned conservation lands, we also
acknowledge that these attributes are complex and change rapidly. At
the same time, it is necessary to distinguish between stewardship
and biodiversity management status in that a single land steward,
such as a national forest, may subdivide its land into units that
may be managed for different purposes that affect biodiversity.
There are
three primary pieces of information involved in developing the
Stewardship dataset:
-
Geographic boundaries of public
land ownership (and voluntarily provided private conservation
lands, e.g., Nature Conservancy Preserves),
-
The
manager/owner attributes of each mapped land unit, and
-
The
biodiversity management status category of each mapped unit.
The
importance of this map in the GAP process is not only for the
spatial documentation of the existing network of conservation
lands, it is also the base map from which future designs for the
conservation network will come
