Collection of Species of Greatest Conservation Need Lists from State Wildlife Action Plans
Summary
This collection of files consists of tabular lists of species for states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, including formatting scripts and reformatted data files used as input for taxonomic standardization and assembly into a national database of Species of Greatest Conservation Need. Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) are wildlife species in need of conservation attention as identified by states in their wildlife action plans. In collaboration with the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and state agencies, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) aggregated state SGCN lists to aid in conservation among states, regions, and at a national level. The Species of Greatest Conservation [...]
Summary
This collection of files consists of tabular lists of species for states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, including formatting scripts and reformatted data files used as input for taxonomic standardization and assembly into a national database of Species of Greatest Conservation Need.
Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) are wildlife species in need of conservation attention as identified by states in their wildlife action plans. In collaboration with the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and state agencies, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) aggregated state SGCN lists to aid in conservation among states, regions, and at a national level. The Species of Greatest Conservation Need National Database consists of scientific names validated against taxonomic authorities to increase consistency in names and enable aggregation and summary. This database does not supersede information in original State Wildlife Action Plans but rather supplements them by providing a national view of SGCN.
Guide to collection contents
Items in the collection with a year between 2005 - 2010 in the child item title came from a process that examined each State Wildlife Action Plan and extracted species names into a simple data format. The attached files for those items include the initial files from that process as well as the more recent process files.
Items in the collection with a year between 2011 - 2019 in the child item title came from a process where the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (AFWA) requested the states to fill out a spreadsheet template with their Species of Greatest Conservation Need and provide it to the USGS for integration and taxonomic alignment.
Items in the collection with a year between 2020 - 2022 in the child item title came from a process of extracting Species of Greatest Conservation Need lists from State Wildlife Action Plans provided to the U.S. Geological Survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Note: Although most states adhere to a decadal cycle (2005, 2015) of comprehensive revisions of their State Wildlife Action Plans, some states follow a different cycle or submitted their Plans in different years. To better reflect the actual year associated with a State SGCN list in the SGCN National Database, the years in child item titles for some states were changed to reflect the actual year of State Wildlife Action Plan submission to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for approval or the year the states associate with their Plans. However, files within child items prior to 2020 still retain their original filenames, which often represented the decadal cycle year rather than the submission year.
This collection in ScienceBase provides tabular input files of Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) lists from states, District of Columbia and U.S. territories extracted from their State Wildlife Action Plans, and processing files used to initially reformat the data for use by the USGS in standardization and integration of the data into the SGCN National Database. The value-added data standardization process conducted by the USGS examines the scientific names provided in each state SGCN list, aligning those names wherever possible with the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) backbone taxonomy, and NatureServe Explorer taxonomic species classification to help identify SGCN in common between multiple states that might be referred to with different scientific names locally.
