SBIR Phase II: Multispecies Ecological Valuation and Landscape Management

Applied Biomathematics Inc, Setauket NY

Investigators

Abstract

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will refine, validate, and extend new methods developed in Phase I to compute the community-level risk of extinction or demographic threat for individual sites or landscapes and assign a multispecies conservation value. The objective of such methods is to provide a statistically valid approach to ecological valuation and landscape management. This research will provide an independent measure of the value of a particular site based on its ecological components, i.e., species, and the threats facing it. The new methods will estimate a multispecies conservation value as a spatially explicit weighting of species-specific habitat suitability maps by their respective species-specific extinction risks. This research will also develop a multivariate generalization of recently described exact methods for computing risk of extinction for species of which little is known. Two potential areas of commercial applications of this project include software sales and case studies. The final product of the proposed research will be part of RAMAS Library of Ecological Software, and will be made available to potential users in overnmental agencies and industrial companies.