Conservation Deficits for the Continental United States: an Ecosystem Gap Analysis

Few attempts have been made to analyze the status of conservation efforts at a continental scale, mainly because of the lack of high-quality data sets at this scale. Given that land management agencies want to prioritize conservation efforts and spend limited resources wisely, we recognized the need to undertake a national gap analysis. We developed the most detailed national vegetation cover map feasible to analyze the degree of representation of ecosystem analysis units (an initial representation of ecosystem types) in the network of conservation lands for the continental United States. We combined The Nature Conservancy’s ecoregions with the natural land-cover types of the National Land Cover Data Set and examined the conservation status of each combination. The majority of ecosystem analysis units have a small percentage of their total area residing in lands that are managed to support biodiversity. The median percentage of area conserved on status 1 and 2 lands (highest of four levels of protection) as designated by the Gap Analysis Program for the 554 ecosystem analysis units is 4.0% (SD 18.1%). This finding, which highlights our national conservation deficits, points to the need to address the size and diversity of the conservation estate.