PARENT SESSION
Special Session - The Southwest Regional Gap Analysis Project Chair(s): Kepner, William ¹, Ramsey, Douglas², Prior-McGee, Julie³, ¹ Landscape Ecology Branch, Las Vegas, NV² Utah State University, Logan, UT³ New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM
Wednesday, March 31, 2004 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM Apollo Room 7

The Gap Analysis Program (GAP) is a national interagency program that maps the distribution of plant communities and selected animal species and compares these distributions with land stewardship to identify biotic elements at potential risk of endangerment. GAP uses Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to assemble and view large amounts of biological and land management data to identify areas (gaps) where conservation efforts may not be sufficient to maintain diversity of living natural resources. Historically, GAP has been conducted by individual states; however this has resulted in inconsistencies in mapped distributions of vegetation types and animal habitat across state lines because of differences in mapping and modeling protocols. This was further compounded from the lack of a national vegetation classification nomenclature. In response to these limitations, GAP embarked on a second-generation effort to conduct the program at a regional scale, using a vegetation classification scheme applicable across the US, and ecoregional units as the basis for segmenting the landscape into manageable units. The program’s first formalized multi-state regional effort includes the five states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah) comprising the Southwest Regional GAP Analysis Project (SW ReGAP).

The Southwest Regional Gap Project: A Database Model for Regional Landscape Assessment, Resource Planning, and Vulnerability Analysis. ^*KEPNER, WILLIAM ¹, COMER, PATRICK ², OSBORNE, DIANE ³, SEMMENS, DARIUS ⁴ and GERGELY, KEVIN ⁵, ¹ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Las Vegas, NV, USA² NatureServe, Boulder, CO, USA³ U.S. Bureau of Land Management,, Denver, CO, USA⁴ USDA, Agricultural Research Service , Tucson, AZ, USA⁵ U.S. Geological Survey,, Moscow, ID, USA

ABSTRACT- The Gap Analysis Program (GAP) is a national interagency program that maps the distribution of plant communities and selected animal species and compares these distributions with land stewardship to identify biotic elements at potential risk of endangerment. Acquisition of primary data and database development are an initial feature of any landscape indicator and assessment project, including conservation mapping. The Southwest Regional GAP spatial data have been developed for the purpose of creating a regional tool for assessing biodiversity protection. One intent of the project is to make the database available in a format that can be used by other researchers, public agencies, resource managers, non-governmental organizations, decision-makers, and user groups. Additionally, the information can be utilized for resource management planning actions and other geographic initiatives to characterize relative vulnerability of natural resources within the 5-state area. It is the premise of this project that landscape composition and pattern measures are diagnostic of environmental and hydrological condition and can be quantitatively measured using GIS and remote sensing-based technologies. Acquisition of primary data is the first step of any research process to develop regional, state, and watershed scale environmental assessment and to predict future environmental risk to include other socially relevant end-points in addition to biodiversity.

KEY WORDS: regional vulnerability analysis, regional environmental assessment, natural resource planning, regional indicators, geospatial data