Spatial Conservation Biogeography Across Public and Private Lands

Keywords: conservation biogeography, volunteered geographic information, citizen science, novel ecosystems, private land conservation
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56

Abstract

Land use and management shifts present major threats to native ecosystems due to impacts on species ranges and the alteration of species assemblages through non-native species introductions. The conservation of these lands and associated biodiversity is pertinent and requires comprehensive biogeographic and ecological analyses that identify past, present, and future patterns of species distributions and ecosystem function. With an ever-increasing amount of spatial data related to species occurrence available through online citizen science platforms, the number and type of questions that can be answered related to conservation biogeography has rapidly expanded. However, spatial and taxonomic biases are known to exist in these datasets and issues of access related to public/private lands create discrepancies in the spatial patterning of these data.This presentation pulls from multiple subfields of geospatial and environmental geography in order to adequately encapsulate the challenges inherent to local and regional scale conservation assessment and implementation. An assessment of vegetation structure and phenology in the Texas hill country with satellite imagery and in situ ecological surveying serves as an example of spatially- and temporally- dynamic landscape assessment. Spatial analyses of citizen science data investigate socioeconomic and demographic patterns in opportunistic, volunteered species datasets and inform approaches to accounting for inherent spatial and taxonomic gaps. These studies are bridged together in an assessment of exotic game ranching in Texas and discussion of the impacts of novel species assemblages and habitat fragmentation. These investigations provide insight for conservation biogeographers studying ecosystem function and species distributions across heterogeneous land tenure settings.