Gap Analysis to Help Conservation Efforts Statewide

Date:  March 12, 1997
Editor: D'Lyn Ford  (505) 646-6528, dlford@nmsu.edu

LAS CRUCES -- Bruce Thompson, adjunct professor of fishery and wildlife sciences at New Mexico State University, has been on a four-year-long hunt. Armed with hundreds of data sets, he's been looking not for trophy bucks but for gaps in wildlife conservation.

"Gap analysis means simply to look for plant communities or animal species that represent gaps in conservation efforts -- meaning they're not adequately distributed in areas that are managed to promote long-term conservation of biological diversity," he said.

Thompson is assistant leader for wildlife of the New Mexico Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, a joint state-federal program housed at NMSU.

Information from New Mexico's Gap Analysis Project will be available this month from the Resource Geographic Information System (RGIS) in Albuquerque. The information can be used for better wildlife and land management planning throughout the state.

"We're looking beyond single endangered species management to a more comprehensive view of the land to help land managers make good decisions for the future," Thompson said.

New Mexico's project, part of a nationwide Gap Analysis Program, received financial support from 13 different federal, state and university contributors.

The results of the gap project, electronic maps of New Mexico, remind Thompson of encyclopedia entries for the human body with clear overlays that show the skeletal, circulatory and other body systems.

The gap analysis maps, however, include about 600 layers of information stacked one on top of the other. The layers represent databases about plant community distributions, predicted distributions of 584 animal species, and levels of land management.

"Once the information is stacked up, you can drive so-called cookie cutters through the maps, and those cookie cutters represent various questions," Thompson explained. "We can ask what species are likely to occur in a particular area to help conservation planners, or we can ask what plant communities don't occur in very large proportions in areas that are managed for long-term biological diversity."

The analysis revealed that several plant communities in the "Bootheel" of southwestern New Mexico are at-risk. It also confirmed that riparian areas and wetlands are more jeopardized statewide than other plant communities, because they are limited in number and occur less often on well-conserved lands.

"We also found that 80 percent of the animal species we looked at in New Mexico have less than 10 percent of their range on land managed for long-term conservation," Thompson said. "Amphibians and aquatic reptiles, in particular, end up at-risk because they are associated with restricted wetlands."

He said, however, that not all of the 80 percent are definitely at-risk. "Our analysis merely means that these species need to be evaluated further. Our data needs to be analyzed from an even larger ecological region standpoint with information from our neighboring states."

Thompson said wildlife managers don't want to make an error and think something is at-risk, just because it's at-risk in New Mexico. "A species at-risk here may actually be quite plentiful or well-conserved in a surrounding area."

Even within the state, Thompson said people need to realize that the map is coarse. "This isn't intended for people interested in managing their backyards or their back 40, it's intended for use on the landscape scale with tens of thousands of acres or more."

Thompson said nearly 500 private and public agency cooperators in the state helped with the gap project by providing information or verifying satellite data for the plant communities map. Assistance from numerous private landowners helped ensure better accuracy of the information collected.

Wildlife managers and others interested in accessing New Mexico's gap analysis data can visit the RGIS World Wide Web site at http://rgis.unm.edu:8080. Or, call (505) 277-3622. For more information about future gap analysis activities in New Mexico, contact the research unit at (505) 646-6053.