PARENT SESSION
Organized Oral Session 2: Measuring landscape connectivity - tool for species conservation
Organizer(s): P Kindlmann, F Burel, and J Baudry
Monday, August 8, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 510b, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

National-scale indicators of landscape pattern.

Cavender-Bares, Kent^*,1, O'Malley, Robin¹, ¹ The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics & the Environment, Washington, DC

ABSTRACT- The State of the Nation's Ecosystems project, run by the Heinz Center over the past seven years, is an effort to establish ecological indicators for the United States (http://www.heinzctr.org/ecosystems). The process has been built on the model of the economic indicators, including unemployment rate and GDP. Ecological indicators will undoubtedly be quite different, however, the goal is the same: credible indicators that track status over time—in this case for the nation's main ecosystem types. Among the indicators in the first major report, which was released in 2002, was a suite of landscape pattern indicators for farmlands, forests, grasslands and shrublands, and urban and suburban areas. Working toward the next major edition of the report, due out in 2007, a major objective has been to strengthen the ecological basis of these pattern indicators and improve their cross-ecosystem consistency. The Heinz Center convened a group of experts from industry, government agencies, environmental non-governmental organizations, and academia. The group has met four times over the course of the past two years and has produced a suite of revised indicators for the 2007 report. In nearly all cases, the group recommended major changes to the existing metric, or they proposed an indicator that was previously absent from the report. Special attention was given to freshwater and coastal indicators of landscape pattern, because the 2002 report did not include such indicators. Proposed indicators include a broad analysis of the adjacency of different landcover types. An indicator of structural connectivity is proposed for forest and grassland-shrubland ecosystem types. The intermingling of developed land with croplands is the focus of an indicator for farmland landscapes. For the human-created ecosystems (i.e., farmlands and urban and suburban areas) indicators are proposed that describe the remaining "natural" lands (i.e., forests, grasslands/shrublands, and wetlands) in these landscapes. In addition, an indicator describing the conversion of "natural" land to developed is proposed. It is proposed that connectivity in freshwater ecosystems is best evaluated by the spatial arrangement of dams and diversions. Indicators for the coastal zone are still being developed.

Key words: Landscape Pattern, Ecological Indicators