GIS Success Stories in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

The use of Geographic Information Systems has assisted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to make many important decisions. Below are a few representative success stories about how GIS has helped us protect wildlife.

National Wetlands Inventory Data Sharing : An on-going project to make wetlands data readily available to users.

GIS Implementation in the Pacific Islands

The Pacific Islands Ecoregion office decided to use GIS technology to support the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service mission in the Pacific. The office wanted to be able to support the numerous Ecoregion projects internally, instead of using numerous contractors. The Pacific Islands Ecoregion office have agreements with local, state and private entities on data sharing and have acquired base layer data and other thematic coverages for the main Hawaiian Islands.

This use of GIS has so far:

• Assisted the development of mitigation for Pittman-Robertson Act funding in Hawaii. The State of Hawaii's game management program adversely impacts numerous endangered Hawaiian birds, plants, and snails. Both the State of Hawaii and the Service used GIS to determine which endangered species were potentially affected by Pittman-Robertson actions, to prioritize populations for special protection (mitigation/compensation), and to modify management efforts to reduce adverse impacts.
• Supported the ROTA Habitat Conservation Plan. GIS maps of Mariana Crow densities, Rota bridled white surveys, candidate plant locations, island conservation areas, and natural vegetation maps were used to suggest alternatives to the ROTA Habitat Conservation Plan planning group. The maps helped explain the habitat needs of endangered species and suggest areas for compatible development actions. The document maps for the Recovery Plans that are written in this office have also been produced using GIS.
• Provided essential habitat planning for endangered Hawaiian plants. Hawaii has over 300 endangered, proposed, or candidate plants. The effort to determine the essential habitat needs of these plants has greatly benefited from the use of GIS to plot past and present distributions, analyze the probable success of various alternatives, and to convey recovery objectives. This effort involved the sharing of GIS data between the Service, State of Hawaii, and The Nature Conservancy.

Erie National Wildlife Refuge Revenue Sharing Appraisal

GIS technology was used to separate information about land in the refuge by cover type. This is critical, since there can be substantial differences in per acre values for adjacent cover types. For example, bayside marsh valued at $525 per acre might be right next to prime oceanfront acreage valued at $60,000 per acre. Before GIS was used, the planners had to rely on old hardcopy maps and try to figure out the acreage in each category. This crude method led to large miscalculations.

Completion of an accurate RSA would not have been possible without the GIS data, because GIS can substantiate information. While extensive market data research can lend substantial support for per acre values, these per acre values are useless the acreage estimates can be proved to be accurate. The Erie National Wildlife Refuge RSA now has supported per acre values and defensible GIS cover type breakdowns by acreage.