LARGE-AREA MAPPING OF BIODIVERSITY

The age of discovery, description. and classification of biodiversity is entering a new phase. In responding to the conservation imperative, we can now supplement the essential work of systematics with spatiall y explicit information on species and assemblages of species. This is possible because of recent conceptual. technical. and organizational p rogress in generating synoptic views of the earths surface and a great deal of its biological content, at multiple scales of thematic as wel l as geographic resolution. The development of extensive spatial data on species distributions and vegetation types provides us with a frame work for: (a) assessing what we know and where we know it at meso-scal es. and (b) stratifying the biological universe so that higher-resolut ion surveys can be more efficiently implemented. covering, for example , geographic adequacy of specimen collections, population abundance. r eproductive success, and genetic dynamics. The land areas involved are very large, and the questions, such as resolution, scale, classificat ion, and accuracy, are complex. In this paper. we provide examples fro m the United States Gap Analysis Program on the advantages and limitat ions of mapping the occurrence of terrestrial vertebrate species and d ominant land-cover types over large areas as joint ventures and in mul ti-organizational partnerships, and how these cooperative efforts can be designed to implement results from data development anti analyses a s on-the-ground actions. Clearly, new frameworks for thinking about bi ogeographic information as well as organizational cooperation are need ed if we are to have any hope of documenting the full range of species occurrences and ecological processes in ways meaningful to their mana gement. The Gap Analysis experience provides one model for achieving t hese new frameworks.