Rare Species and Exemplary Natural Communities

One of the long-term objectives of the Vermont Biodiversity Project is to ensure that some manner of conservation protection is extended to ecosystems and natural communities considered representative of the state's landscape and biological diversity. Conservation biologists know that the task can't end there, however. Special places which are home to rare and endemic species and natural communities can slip through a conservation filter that implements only broad-scale representational strategies.

Vermont is fortunate to have an excellent database to help identify such special places. Maintained by the Nongame and Natural Heritage Program of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, this database records over 4000 occurrences of rare, threatened, and endangered plants, animals, and exemplary natural communities throughout the state. We selected 2332 of these "element occurrence records" (or EORs) for analysis, high quality occurrences of organisms or communities known to be rare either in the state or globally. We subdivided these records into 10 groups (9kb image), based on the following information:

• Type of occurrence: plant, animal (vertebrate or invertebrate), community
• Status: rarity ranking, with G1 or S1 indicating the most imperiled species or natural communities globally or statewide
• Condition: the attribute "EORANK" orders occurrences by degree of degradation or disturbance

We mapped these 10 groups of EORs, and drew lines as economically as possible around concentrations ("hotspots") (22.7kb image) of mapped points. An attempt was made to include point locations characteristic of a given landscape or region (an escarpment and talus slopes, for example, or a region of hills and rich fens) within individual polygons. Points not included within drawn polygons are candidates for finer-scaled conservation measures.