Integrated Gap Analysis Project: Assessing Conservation of Freshwater, Estuarine, Marine, and Terrestrial Biodiversity

The structure and function of freshwater, estuarine, and marine environments are affected by surrounding and upstream terrestrial ecosystems. Conservation areas often encompass both terrestrial and aquatic resources. Government policy makers and natural resource managers must often consider a complex landscape matrix and need accurate, fine-scale information on the distribution of species and habitats in order to develop conservation management plans. An integrated terrestrial and aquatic GAP analysis project is addressing this need. The goal is to develop a comprehensive set of databases on Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands’ freshwater and marine resources – including habitat description and mapping, species distributions and conservation status, and protected areas and conservation priorities – combined with existing Puerto Rico and USVI terrestrial GAP databases, to conduct integrated analyses of gaps in conservation protection. As a start to this project we have complied an annotated list of over 1200 animal species associated with terrestrial and aquatic habitats in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. We have modeled the distributions of over 200 of the terrestrial species and are working on 200 aquatic species and their habitat distributions. This will be used to develop species range maps and predicted distributions, which will then be assessed in terms of the degree to which species and habitats are protected for conservation by reserves and other protected areas.