Citation:

Kepner, W. A National Approach to Map and Quantify Terrestrial Vertebrate Biodiversity within an Ecosystem Services Framework. International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), Las Vegas, NV, September 21, 2017.

Impact/Purpose:

This presentation will share the science, technology, and innovation incorporated within EnviroAtlas with and international audience.

Description:

Biodiversity is crucial for the functioning of ecosystems and the products and services from which we transform natural assets of the Earth for human survival, security, and well-being. The ability to assess, report, map, and forecast the life support functions of ecosystems is absolutely critical to our capacity to make informed decisions to maintain the sustainable nature of our environment now and into the future. Because of the variability among living organisms and levels of organization (e.g. genetic, species, ecosystem), biodiversity has always been difficult to measure precisely, especially within a systematic manner and over multiple scales. In answer to this challenge, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has created a partnership with other Federal agencies, academic institutions, and Non-Governmental Organizations to develop the EnviroAtlas (https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas), an online national Decision Support Tool that allows users to view and analyze the geographical description of the supply and demand for ecosystem services, as well as the drivers of change. As part of the EnviroAtlas, an approach has been developed that uses deductive habitat models for all the terrestrial vertebrates of the conterminous United States and clusters them into biodiversity metrics that relate to ecosystem service-relevant categories that reflect elements of A) Biodiversity Conservation; B) Food, Fiber, and Materials; and C) Recreation, Culture, and Aesthetics. Several metrics, such as harvestable species (big game, small game, furbearers, and waterfowl) richness, have been developed and integrated with other measures of biodiversity down to the 30m scale of resolution. Collectively, these have been aggregated up to the national level of interest and thus provide a consistent scalable process from which to make geographic comparisons, provide thematic assessments, and to monitor status and trends in biodiversity. Within the EnviroAtlas platform, the smallest reporting unit is the subwatershed, a 12-digit Hydrological Unit Code (which on average is 104 km2 in area). Once complete, the national biodiversity component for the conterminous U.S. will operate across approximately 85,000 12-digit HUCs and will include 1590 terrestrial vertebrate species (621 bird spp., 365 mammal spp., 322 reptile spp., and 282 amphibian spp.). The project has progressed incrementally at multiple scales in a phased approach, starting with place-based studies, then multi-state regional areas, culminating in the national-level EnviroAtlas. As an example of this incremental approach, I will provide selected results for the contiguous United States along with sub-national areas of interest to demonstrate the multi-scale utility of the system. In these examples, geographic patterns differed among metrics and across the study areas. Additionally, we have created a dynamic element to the system to allow the exploration and addition of other metrics as they become identified and tested.

Record Details: