Milo Pyne
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - 11:30-12:00
What types of natural vegetation exist across the landscape? Which are intrinsically rare or have been severely degraded by human activities? How do we identify the best occurrences of natural communities? Having clear answers to these questions will help us define and categorize the rich ecological diversity of our nation and promote the strategic use of limited conservation resources. Efforts to conserve biological diversity occur at different biological and ecological levels, from genes and species to communities and ecosystems. Communities are assemblages of species that repeatedly co-occur and have the ability to interact with one another. Natural communities and vegetation types can frequently be linked to particular rare, threatened, and endangered species. This has implications for the importance of community inventory and conservation, and for understanding the context for species conservation. But communities are more than the sum of their species, they encompass a myriad of biological and environmental interactions. By describing, tracking, and conserving communities, Natural Area managers can protect a complex suite of organisms, interactions, and processes not easily identified and protected through other means. Recent and current efforts of NatureServe, the Natural Heritage Network, and conservation partners have contributed to the development of classification systems that integrate local and national data. We will discuss some of the issues with delineating, classifying, ranking, mapping, and conserving examples of natural communities and how to relate your local data to both national classifications of natural communities and broader assessments of natural community viability.
Keywords: NATURAL COMMUNITIES, INVENTORY, CONSERVATION