Page 44 - GIS for Science, Volume 3 Preview

warbler occurrences, offers a transparent, reproducible, high-resolution map of likely suitable habitat for the golden-cheeked warbler. This refined map can help direct survey efforts as well as avoidance and mitigation actions in the places where warbler habitat overlaps with road construction. This map also greatly reduces the area where proposed roads and important warbler habitat are likely to overlap.
NatureServe has embarked on a major initiative to develop refined habitat models for species at risk, beginning with more than 2,000 of the most imperiled plants, pollinators, freshwater fish and invertebrates, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles in the lower 48 United States. In 2020, Nature Serve released the Map of Biodiversity Importance (MoBI) on ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, a GIS analysis of the distributions of these species to identify the places that matter most for conserving our national natural heritage. In producing MoBI, NatureServe and its network of natural heritage programs also created an efficient, cloud-based engine for generating, collaboratively evaluating, revising, and sharing refined distribution maps for rare and imperiled species.
Use of a habitat model greatly reduces the areas where proposed roads (purple lines) may interfere with golden-cheeked warbler habitat (red) compared with a county-level range map (tan polygons).
The golden-cheeked warbler is the only bird species whose population nests entirely in the state of Texas.
32
GIS for Science
Locator