Conservation planning projects have been the focus of state and federal agencies and organizations, recently including state comprehensive wildlife conservation strategies (CWCS), regional gap analysis projects (SWReGAP), and The Nature Conservancy’s Ecoregional Assessments. These efforts use various methods to identify areas for conservation action at local and landscape scales, and have largely been legislatively based (e.g. CWCS) or programmatically based (e.g. SWReGAP). The objectives of this research were to identify areas of conservation focus for use within the context of the Southwestern United States including the states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. Areas of conservation focus should include habitat that can support the most species of greatest conservation need (SGCN), occur within identified key habitats, be managed in a manner that allows conservation actions to take place, and include areas that have the greatest threat from factors that modify habitats. We used spatial datasets of each of these four inputs in an additive modeling process utilizing ArcGIS 9.3 in order to identify areas of conservation priority.
Results/Conclusions
The resulting comprehensive model depicts areas that should be a focus of conservation prioritization. Additional models demonstrate how these areas change by taxonomic group. This dynamic assessment can aid land managers and decision makers with land use and conservation planning.
