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A National Approach to Assess Terrestrial Vertebrate Biodiversity within an Ecosystem Services Framework: An Example using the Reptiles and Amphibians of the Mojave Ecoregion
Citation:
Kepner, W. A National Approach to Assess Terrestrial Vertebrate Biodiversity within an Ecosystem Services Framework: An Example using the Reptiles and Amphibians of the Mojave Ecoregion. IVLP (int'l Visitor Leadership Program), Las Vegas, NV, August 20, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation at IVLP (US Dept. of State)
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 that help 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 accurately, 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. We have developed an approach 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 at 30m (Landsat) resolution. Collectively, these metrics provide a consistent scalable process from which to make geographic comparisons, provide thematic assessments, and to monitor status and trends in biodiversity. Currently, we include 1590 terrestrial vertebrate species (621 bird spp., 365 mammal spp., 322 reptile spp., and 282 amphibian spp.) for the conterminous U.S. In this presentation, we identify and map 93 reptile and 38 amphibian biodiversity metrics for the Mojave Ecoregion. We focus on species richness metrics including all reptile species richness; all amphibian species richness; taxa groupings, e.g. snakes, lizards, frogs and toads; and special status species. These metrics are then mapped based on potential species occurrence within the Mojave Desert and compared at finer scales within specific ecosystems to demonstrate the multi-scale utility of the approach. In these examples, geographic patterns differed among metrics and across the study area. 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.