Grad Forum: Amanda Borens

Graduate Forum is an informal venue for SNR grads to present their work. The forum is open to graduate students.

Amanda Borens presents her research at Grad Forum:

Using distribution models to prioritize the landscape for conservation of birds.

Conservation planning requires identifying areas that are important for
maintaining biodiversity but that also have high potential to support
conservation as a future land use. In Arizona, for example, nearly half of the
areas with the greatest numbers of breeding birds are privately owned, limiting
options for effecting conservation. Alternative strategies to identify
conservation areas can vary in their effectiveness with differences in
conservation priorities, availability of survey data, and whether they consider
patterns of land ownership. To explore a range of alternatives to help guide
land-use planning, we used 240-m resolution Animal Habitat Models for 261 bird
species in the southwestern United States to generate predicted species
distributions. We then used these predictions to prioritize lands across
Arizona based on three measures of bird-species richness: (1) total species
richness, (2) richness weighted by richness of adjacent areas, and (3) Arizona
Partners in Flight?s species priorities. We combined these measures with
site-specific classifications of vegetation and potential threats to compare
efficiency of prioritization strategies for identifying the smallest possible
land areas supporting the greatest numbers of bird species. Measures differed
in efficiency most in identifying how much land would be required to support
95% of all species. For example, measures 1 and 3 required 52% and 66%,
respectively, of land in Arizona to support 98% of all bird species, whereas
measure 2 required only 18%. Measures 1 and 2 were more efficient in
identifying lands needed for all rare species (52% and 35% of land,
respectively) and all range-restricted species (52% and 26%, respectively) than
measure 3, which required 86% of land to achieve both goals. A planning strategy
based on predicted species distributions and other factors important to
effective conservation will allow planners to explore conservation alternatives
efficiently across multiple spatial scales.

Hope to see you all there!  As usual, happy hour will follow the presentation.