Estimated habitat suitability for the American burying beetle using land cover classes in the Southern Plains (ver. 1.1, June 2020)

Potentially suitable habitat for the American burying beetle (Nicrophorus americanus) was identified within the Southern Plains. The American burying beetle (ABB) is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, but in 2019 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to reclassify this species as threatened. We applied a deductive model for the ABB that identified potentially suitable habitat using LANDFIRE Existing Vegetation Types (EVT). The habitat model ranked each EVT using one of four categories: (1) favorable; suitable vegetation to support all or critical portions of the ABB life cycle, (2) conditional; favorable only under certain conditions including seasonality of flooding and land management practices, (3) marginal; [...]