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A National Analysis of Reptile Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services within the Protected Areas of the United States
Citation:
Boykin, K., W. Kepner, A. McKerrow, A. Neale, AND K. Gergely. A National Analysis of Reptile Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services within the Protected Areas of the United States. TWS (The Wildlife Society) 24th Annual Conference, Albuquerque, NM, September 23 - 27, 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., threatened and endangered species), whereas others may indicate indirect and difficult to quantify relationships to services (e.g., taxa richness and cultural value). We identified biodiversity and ecosystem service metrics that are reflected by reptiles and mapped these across the conterminous United States. We conducted a literature review to identify the biodiversity and ecosystems services that have been described. We then used the 322 reptile species distribution models in the conterminous United States from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Gap Analysis Program to begin to map those services. We focused 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 U.S. Geological Survey’s Gap Analysis Program Protected Areas Database of the United States to provide insight into current conservation of reptile biodiversity and ecosystem services. We present results of these analyses of biodiversity and ecosystem services metrics focusing on current distributions and overlap with conservation lands
