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Representation of Reptile Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services within the Protected Areas of the Conterminous United States
Citation:
Boykin, K., W. Kepner, A. McKerrow, A. Neale, AND K. Gergely. Representation of Reptile Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services within the Protected Areas of the Conterminous United States. ACES Conference, Jacksonville, FL, December 05 - 09, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation on a national system that uses deductive habitat models to measure and map reptile diversity (322 species) for the conterminous U.S.
Description:
A focus for resource management, conservation planning, and environmental decision analysis has been mapping and quantifying biodiversity and ecosystem services. The challange has been to integrate ecology with economics to better understand the effects of human policies and actions and their subsequent impacts on human well-being and ecosystem function. Biodiversity is valued by humans in varied ways, and thus is an important input to include in assessing the benefits of ecosystems to humans. Some biodiversity metrics more clearly reflect ecosystem services (e.g., game species, Federally theatened and endangered species), whereas others may indicate indirect and difficult to quantify relationships to services (e.g., taxa richness and cultural value). Recently, species distribution models have been developed at broad spatial scales and can be used to map biodiversity metrics. The importance of reptiles to biodiversity and ecosystems services is not often described and only recently have there been attempts to identify these ecosystem services. Provisioning services provided by reptiles include food (e.g. turtles, alligators) and medicine (e.g. anti-venom). Regulating services include disease transmission and pest outbreaks (e.g. rodent populations). Cultural services include awareness of venomous species and regulatory frameworks (Federally and state listed species). Supporting services include food web dynamics, altering physical habitats, and cycling nutrients. In the present study, we identify and map reptile biodiversity and ecosystem services metrics. We used recently completed species distribution models for reptiles in the conterminous United States from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Gap Analysis Program. We focus on species richness metrics including all reptile species richness (322 reptiles), taxa groupings of lizards (116), snakes (146) and turtles (58), NatureServe conservation status (G1, G2, G3) species (61), IUCN listed reptiles (39), threatened and endangered species (22), Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation listed reptiles (63), venomous reptiles (21) and rare species (80). These metrics were then analyzed based on the Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) to provide insight into current conservation lands and reptile biodiversity and ecosystem services. We present results of these various biodiversity and ecosystem services metrics focusing on current distributions and overlap with conservation lands. The project has been conducted at multiple scales, starting at watersheds, then multi-state regional areas, and currently at the national-level EnviroAtlas. As an example of the plasticity of this approach, we provide results for one taxa (reptiles) for the conterminous United States. We provide a method to map and quantify ecosystems services at broad scales using documented agency or organization lists and USGS Gap Analysis Program datasets to look at various aspects of reptile biodiversity and ecosystem services. These datasets are not available globally but other models at the county, state/province, nation, continental, and global scale can be used to conduct similar analysis.
