Blue Hula,
You are right to state that the US has put a lot of effort into GAP Analyses nationwide over the last decade. I was impressed to see that most states have assessed species richness and conducting mapping programs for most states in the country associated with "Terrestrial GAP".
Terrestrial gap involves the use of remote sensing to map vegetation patterns, and human use zones (eg. cities). This is followed by creation of databases that record species occurrences (presence) associated with various habitats or vegetation patterns. The Heritage program associated with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) played a big role. The Heritage program left the TNC and now is called NatureServe. They have developed a Ecoystem Classification scheme. The USGS has the Biological Resources Division (BRD) which has its own staff doing GAP Analyses and also contracting various universities, NGOs like NatureServe, and state agencies. Terrestial GAP now is at the EcoRegion level, and is being redone to ensure consistency acrsoss states.
Aquatic Gap is still in a number of pilot programs. Scott Sowa is the MoRAP coordinator for Missouri. A number of states are now following Missouri's lead and mapping fish, clams, crayfish according to stream segments using the National Hydrographic Database (NHD) stream segments. This can allow species occurrences to be mapped by NHD polygons in a GIS.
Sophisticated models have been developed to predict species occurrences where the habitat conditions are known (digital terrain, soil types, vegetation, water temperatures etc). The GAP program has done a good job. It remains to be seen whether governments will buy up land in the areas idendified as having species in need of protection or having high species richness. The meeting signaled a new parnership and cooperation between USGS and the USFWS. GAP staff are being asked to assist USFWS with mapping species associated with the USFWS Reserve System.
Overall, I got a better idea of a national strategy coming into place to map distributions and protect common species "keeping common species common" that is being spearheaded by USGS in collaboration with other agencies, NGOs etc. to support ecosystem management. To gain a full understanding of what is going on one should look at the the web sites for GAP Analysis, and associated with the National Biological Inventory (NBII).
The NBII is creating a network of centers to serve species information and spatial (GIS) coverages nationwide.
With regard to marine GAP this is still in its infancy. So far, there is little being done in the marine environment through the GAP sponsored programs. They gave one grant to a group in Hawaii that is mapping species from the headwaters of streams down to and into the nearshore marine environment. The Great Lakes GAP group is working on tributary steams and rivers, and parts of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie nearshore. The have representatives from USGS labs spread from New York to Michigan to do the program covering New York, Ohio, and Michigan. They expressed interest in obtaining the software for standardizing fish catch rates and for modeling and mapping species in ArcGIS that my group has developed for modeling estuaries at the Florida Marine Research Institute of FWC.
Peter Rubec
