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Analysis of Reptile Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services within the Protected Areas at a National Scale
Citation:
Boykin, K., W. Kepner, A. McKerrow, A. Neale, AND K. Gergely. Analysis of Reptile Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services within the Protected Areas at a National Scale. JAM of AZ-NM American Fisheries and Wildlife Societies, Farmington, NM, February 09 - 11, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation on a national system that uses deductive habitat models to measure and map reptile diversity 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 challenge 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, threatened and endangered species), whereas others may indicate indirect and difficult to quantify relationships to services (e.g., taxa richness and cultural value). In the present study, we identify and map reptile biodiversity and ecosystem services metrics. The importance of reptiles to biodiversity and ecosystems services is not often described. We used 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, taxa groupings of lizards, snakes and turtles, NatureServe conservation status (G1, G2, G3) species, IUCN listed reptiles, threatened and endangered species, Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation listed reptiles, and rare species. These metrics were analyzed with the Protected Areas Database of the United States to provide insight into current conservation lands and reptile biodiversity and ecosystem services. We present results of these biodiversity and ecosystem services metrics focusing on current distributions and overlap with conservation lands.
