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Track: Natural Resources and Conservation
Xiaojun Li
The Nature Conservancy
1815 North Lynn Street
Arlington, VA 22209
Telephone: 703-247-3745
Fax: 703-8412722
E-mail: xli@tnc.org
Preliminary Assessment of the Biodiversity Conservation Value of Department of Defense (DoD) Lands among Ecoregions in the United States
The ecoregional distribution of DoD lands was determined from a spatial analysis of Bailey's ecoregions and federal lands by using a GIS system. This work has been carried out by the Central Ecology Program of the Conservation Science Division at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) for a national-level DoD conservation planning initiative. We have analyzed the distribution of all DoD lands among Bailey's ecoregional provinces in the United States. By comparison with other federal lands, DoD lands are relatively evenly distributed among the 51 ecoregional provinces. We also carried out the map-based estimates of the quantity of DoD lands in each Bailey's ecoregional province. We found that DoD lands occur in 37 of the 51 ecoregional provinces. In several ecoregional provinces, the DoD lands constitute the highest percentage of all federal lands. The results indicate that, from a representative perspective, DoD lands have a high biodiversity conservation value and should be given a special consideration in
TNC's conservation analysis and efforts. The data used to describe the DoD lands come from two sources. DoD lands in Alaska and Hawaii were extracted from the USGS DLG files (scale = 1:2,000,000). DoD lands in the lower 48 states came from TNC's west regional office. The digital ecoregion map came from Robert Bailey at USDA Forest Service (Bailey, 1995). Data used in the analysis are based on small-scale maps and should be used primarily for preliminary conservation planning at the country or continental level.
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