Applying Biodiversity Metrics within an Ecosystem Services Framework to a Habitat Conservation Plan: a Case Study in Partner Engagement
Citation:
Boykin, K., W. Kepner, A. McKerrow, AND A. Neale. Applying Biodiversity Metrics within an Ecosystem Services Framework to a Habitat Conservation Plan: a Case Study in Partner Engagement. ACES 2018 Conference, Washington, DC, December 03 - 06, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation of a case study on applying biodiversity metrics to a habitat conservation plan.
Description:
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 in a systematic manner and over multiple scales. In answer to this challenge, 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 reflecting 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, to 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 the present effort, we worked with the participants of the Apple Valley Multispecies Habitat Conservation Plan (MSHCP) in California to identify and quantify biodiversity metrics for the MSHCP and the Mojave Ecoregion as a whole. We focus on species richness metrics including all species richness; taxa groupings, e.g. amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles; and special status species. Metrics were mapped based on potential species occurrence within the Apple Valley MSHCP and the Mojave Desert to demonstrate the multi-scale utility of the approach. Analysis of desert tortoise habitat identified multiple other species benefitting from tortoise habitat conservation. In these examples, geographic patterns differed among metrics and across the study area. Our approach incorporates built-in extensibility so that as other metrics become identified, they can be explored and added to the system. This process allows for similar analysis and application anywhere within the conterminous United States at varying scales.
