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Ecological indicators can be used to detect, diagnose, and summarize information about environmental problems. Despite these important values, few indicators have been systematically validated. Broad information on relevance, feasibility, estimates of variance, and interpretation of the ecological indicator is needed for initial validation. Comparisons of ecological indicators can only be accomplished if they are contrasted with standard published criteria. In this paper, information on the potential use of butterflies as indicators of riparian quality is provided within a standard framework. Additionally, data from riparian areas along the Arkansas, Green, Pecos, Rio Grande, and Yampa rivers were collected to validate...
Biological soil crust (BSC) communities (composed of lichens, bryophytes, and cyanobacteria) may be more dynamic on short-time scales than previously thought, requiring new and informative short-term monitoring techniques. We used repeat digital photography and image analysis, which revealed a change in area of a dominant BSC lichen, Collema tenax. The data generated correlated well with gross photosynthesis (r=0.57) and carotenoid content (r=0.53), two variables that would be expected to be positively related to lichen area. We also extracted fatty acids from lichen samples and identified useful phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) indicators for the Collema mycobiont (20:1, 15:0, 23:0), and the Collema photobiont (18:3?3)....
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The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) requires the use of ecological indicators to measure the success of restoration efforts. The Everglades amphibian community is ideal because amphibians are present in all habitats and under all hydrologic regimes. During Everglades restoration, hydrologic patterns will change and the response of ecological indicators will determine success. Fourteen amphibian species were detected through visual encounter surveys, vocalization surveys and trapping methods throughout the study and the occurrence information collected in this project database.
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The Everglades Vulnerability Analysis (EVA) is a series of connected Bayesian networks that models the landscape-scale response of indicators of Everglades ecosystem health to changes in hydrology and salinity on the landscape. Using the uncertainty built into each network, it also produces surfaces of vulnerability in relation to user-defined ‘ideal’ outcomes. This dataset includes the code used to build the modules and generate outputs of module outcome probabilities and landscape vulnerability.
Invasive plants pose a significant threat to the integrity and biodiversity of native systems. Weed risk assessment and management provides a framework for assessing this threat. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the threat posed to biodiversity by invasive plants in a rapidly changing climate. This paper aims to estimate the impacts of climate change on exotic plant habitats, and incorporates elements of dispersal to develop a management index for identifying invasive plant threat under climate change. The spatial distribution of habitat suitability is modelled at the landscape scale for multiple exotic plant species under current climate and a climate change scenario for the year 2030. Expert...
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The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) requires the use of ecological indicators to measure the success of restoration efforts. The Everglades amphibian community is ideal because amphibians are present in all habitats and under all hydrologic regimes. During Everglades restoration, hydrologic patterns will change and the response of ecological indicators will determine success. Fourteen amphibian species were detected through visual encounter surveys, vocalization surveys and trapping methods throughout the study and the occurrence information collected in this project database.
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Conservation prioritization usually focuses on conservation of rare species or biodiversity, rather than ecological processes. This is partially due to a lack of informative indicators of ecosystem function. Biological soil crusts (BSCs) trap and retain soil and water resources in arid ecosystems and function as major carbon and nitrogen fixers; thus, they may be informative indicators of ecosystem function. We created spatial models of multiple indicators of the diversity and function of BSCs (species richness, evenness, functional diversity, functional redundancy, number of rare species, number of habitat specialists, nitrogen and carbon fixation indices, soil stabilization, and surface roughening) for the 800,000-ha...
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The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) requires the use of ecological indicators to measure the success of restoration efforts. The Everglades amphibian community is ideal because amphibians are present in all habitats and under all hydrologic regimes. During Everglades restoration, hydrologic patterns will change and the response of ecological indicators will determine success. Fourteen amphibian species were detected through visual encounter surveys, vocalization surveys and trapping methods throughout the study and the occurrence information collected in this project database.
The Everglades Vulnerability Analysis (EVA) is a series of connected, modular Bayesian networks that predict the response of several Everglades indicators of ecosystem health to changes in hydrology, salinity, and the landscape. This release provides the code to update the vegetation module of EVA, validate the updated module, and provides the process and outputs of a sensitivity analysis of the module. Key updates include expanding the number of vegetation classes predicted from 6 to 11 classes, simplifying the inputs to the module, and increasing the number of vegetation observations used to parameterize the network. The validation of the module includes the process to calculate receiver operating characteristic...
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The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) requires the use of ecological indicators to measure the success of restoration efforts. The Everglades amphibian community is ideal because amphibians are present in all habitats and under all hydrologic regimes. During Everglades restoration, hydrologic patterns will change and the response of ecological indicators will determine success. Fourteen amphibian species were detected through visual encounter surveys (VES), vocalization surveys and trapping methods throughout the study and the occurrence information collected in this project database.
RIVPACS models produce a community-level measure of biological condition known as O/E, which is derived from a comparison of the observed (O) biota with those expected (E) to occur in the absence of anthropogenic stress. We used benthic macroinvertebrate and environmental data collected at 925 stream monitoring stations, from 1993 to 2001, to develop, validate, and apply a RIVPACS model to assess the biological condition of wadeable streams in Wyoming. From this dataset, 296 samples were identified as reference, 157 of which were used to calibrate the model, 46 to validate it, and 93 to examine temporal variability in reference site O/E-values. We used cluster analyses to group the model development reference sites...
Data collected from 172 sites in 20 major river basins between 1993 and 1995 as part of the US Geological Survey's National Water-Quality Assessment Program were analyzed to assess relations among basinwide land use (agriculture, forest, urban, range), water physicochemistry, riparian condition, and fish community structure. A multimetric approach was used to develop regionally referenced indices of fish community and riparian condition. Across large geographic areas, decreased riparian condition was associated with water-quality constituents indicative of nonpoint source inputs—total nitrogen and suspended sediment and basinwide urban land use. Decreased fish community condition was associated with increases in...
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The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) requires the use of ecological indicators to measure the success of restoration efforts. The Everglades amphibian community is ideal because amphibians are present in all habitats and under all hydrologic regimes. During Everglades restoration, hydrologic patterns will change and the response of ecological indicators will determine success. Fourteen amphibian species were detected through visual encounter surveys, vocalization surveys and trapping methods throughout the study and the occurrence information collected in this project database.


    map background search result map search result map Prioritizing Conservation Effort through the Use of Biological Soil Crusts as Ecosystem Function Indicators in an Arid Region Data for herpetofaunal inventories of the national parks of South Florida and the Caribbean: Volume I, Everglades National Park Data for herpetofaunal inventories of the national parks of South Florida and the Caribbean: Volume IV, Biscayne National Park Data for herpetofaunal inventories of the national parks of South Florida and the Caribbean: Volume III, Big Cypress National Preserve Data for herpetofaunal inventories of the national parks of South Florida and the Caribbean: Volume II, Virgin Islands National Park Use of amphibian communities as indicators of restoration success Everglades Vulnerability Analysis (EVA) modeling scripts and output Updates to the Everglades Vulnerability Analysis (EVA) vegetation module Data for herpetofaunal inventories of the national parks of South Florida and the Caribbean: Volume II, Virgin Islands National Park Data for herpetofaunal inventories of the national parks of South Florida and the Caribbean: Volume IV, Biscayne National Park Use of amphibian communities as indicators of restoration success Data for herpetofaunal inventories of the national parks of South Florida and the Caribbean: Volume III, Big Cypress National Preserve Data for herpetofaunal inventories of the national parks of South Florida and the Caribbean: Volume I, Everglades National Park Everglades Vulnerability Analysis (EVA) modeling scripts and output Prioritizing Conservation Effort through the Use of Biological Soil Crusts as Ecosystem Function Indicators in an Arid Region Updates to the Everglades Vulnerability Analysis (EVA) vegetation module