North American nature preserves have traditionally been chosen based on two criteria: esthetic value and economic worthlessness. If the place could be farmed, logged, mined, or built upon, it was an unlikely candidate for preservation. But if it was beautiful and remote and unexploitable, it was a shoo-in.
Now, as extinction threatens North America's natural species, more biologically oriented criteria are needed. Twenty years ago, The Nature Conservancy - a private, nonprofit organization whose motto is "Preserve the last of the least and the best of the rest" - began fashioning different criteria.
The Nature Conservancy bases its evaluations on a place's biological importance, either for saving rare species (and ecosystems) or for saving many species. If you have a million bucks to buy a nature preserve, don't blow it on a rocky mountain top that hosts only a couple of common plants. Find instead a little piece of river canyon with a population of flat-spired three-toothed land snails, or a chunk of Florida scrub oak habitat that's home to Florida scrub mint, eastern indigo snakes, Florida scrub jays, and gopher tortoises. Better still, pool your resources and buy a big enough piece of that habitat to include the genetic variety necessary to keep populations of these species around for another million years.
The business of setting conservation priorities is incredibly complicated: North America alone has more than 9 million square miles, hundreds of distinct ecosystems, and hundreds of thousands of species.
To deal with this complexity, The Nature Conservancy created The Natural Heritage Network - a hemisphere-wide community of data centers that manage computer-based data for species and ecosystems. Several Heritage programs started out as part of The Nature Conservancy; all but two of them are now run by state government land-management organizations. Together with Nature Conservancy scientists, the Natural Heritage Network compiles and manages a comprehensive library of computerized data about the world's imperiled flora and fauna.
The network began amassing its databases: first on punch cards, then on a collection of old HP minicomputers, and now on hundreds of PCs. The program uses The Biological and Conservation Data System (which won a Computerworld Smithsonian Award last June along with The Natural Heritage Network). The system manages a quarter of a million data records within each of the local Heritage data centers in 50 US states, 5 Canadian provinces, and 13 Latin American nations.
Each data center sends summary digital information (the legal standing of species and ecosystem types as well as appraisals of their local rarity and vulnerability) to the network's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, where analysts search for continental and global relevance, and send out its findings to every data center that has reason to care.
"Everything's rare someplace," says the system's chief designer, Keith Carr. "But those species we're most concerned with are truly rare. Taking a broader view can help determine which species have the most acute needs. If, say, the piping plover people in Rhode Island know what's happening with the populations of an endangered bird in the Great Lakes, it may influence their conservation priorities."
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt plans to make Heritage's data and program the spine of his new National Biological Survey, a move environmentalists hope will mark a new era in federal conservation policy. Of course, allocations will remain political, and scenic areas teeming with animals will continue to receive the lion's share of the conservation dollar. But just in case anyone in power wants it, there is a hell of a lot of potent information and analysis at the Natural Heritage Network's fingertips about how to preserve the last of the least and the best of the rest. For information about the Nature Conservancy's database, call +1 (703) 247 3720.
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