 Welcome to our third and final seminar in this landscape ecology and management series we have this fall. On behalf of the Blue Mountain Patch Resource Institute and the Eastern Oregon chapter of Sigma's Eye, we thank you all for coming. We began this short series back in October when Danny Lee, Bruce Riemann from Boys and Damon talked about, gave us a landscape analysis of the native fish viability in the clunger root basin. We continue in November with Steve Garmin who gave us a look at how landscape patterns and processes are linked in a general way. And now today we'll finish with a real life example of how landscape processes, specifically at disturbance events, drive patterns of species diversity. Our speaker today is Andy Hansen from Montana State University in Bozeman. Andy has been kicking around for quite a long time doing landscape work. He finished his graduate work at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee as part of one of the strongest landscape ecology programs in this country. From there he post-doc in South Africa, taught a little bit at Humboldt State. Post-doc again at OSU as part of the COPE program and they wound up at Montana State in 1992. He specializes in bird habitat relations at the landscape level. And for those of you who are interested I have a couple of publications of his in ecological applications. If I want copies of these I can make copies. Just approach me after the meeting and I'll do that. Okay the title of his talk today is Mechanisms that Drive Species Diversity in Yellowstone National Park. Thank you Andy Hansen. Thanks a lot Jim. Great to be here. Yesterday when Jim and I talked on the phone I didn't think there was much chance that we actually all would be here but the weather guides weren't as bad as they might have been. I wonder if we might just go ahead and turn on the slide projector and put on the first slide. It's actually kind of fun for me to be able to give this talk to you. Bozeman is maybe on the other side of the inland west and you're a bit on the eastern or the western side here and I'll be curious to see if some of the things we're finding in the Yellowstone area have much applicability to the landscapes that you've been working on. Can't hear, huh? So I'll talk a little louder. Thanks. Turns out there's chairs and stuff up here. Feel free to migrate up if you care to. Alright this is Yellowstone National Park in the surrounding federal lands. Have you heard this referred to as the greater Yellowstone ecosystem? That's a term greater ecosystem that Frank and John Craig had originated some years ago to describe the range of the Yellowstone grizzly bearer. I think though that this term greater ecosystem has evolved and now denotes more so places where there are very strong linkages between ecological communities and human communities. Greater ecosystems perhaps are characterized by having nature reserves and ingredients and land use that radiate out from those nature reserves. And we often think of these sorts of places as some of the last refugia for native species. The real crown jewels of our native landscapes. But interestingly and not without coincidence these places are growing very rapidly in human population size. Likely because at least in part of the natural beauty and the other amenities that are offered by these ecosystems, lots of people that have the wherewithal to get up and move are bailing out of the big cities across North America and coming to places like this. So that raises a lot of questions about how is that type of human population growth influencing the ecology of these greater ecosystems and then in turn what are some of the feedbacks to the human community from that. What I'd like to suggest today is that several greater ecosystems might be characterized by having a set of biophysical attributes that cause them to be particularly sensitive to human population size. That these biophysical characteristics lead to people tending to settle in just those parts of the landscape that are most critical for native species. Now if we can understand these types of relationships between abiotic factors and biodiversity and human settlement patterns that gives us some better basis for trying to come up with management strategies that would try to sustain both the ecological system and the human systems in those areas. Well, colleagues and I have been trying to understand what drives patterns of bird diversity in the Yellowstone system. We've been focusing on the effects of natural disturbance and logging activities on landscape structure under funding from NASA. We've also considered how both these as well as abiotic factors influence rates of plant productivity and consequences for bird abundance and diversity and also for bird population viability. More recently we've initiated some pilot studies on the human biodiversity interaction through time from pre-settlement times up through various eras to present and then trying to push forward. With a particular focus on environmental gradients, natural disturbance and then human activities like land allocation and rural residential development and logging. Well rather than talk in detail about any of those individual studies I'd like to sort of weave them together into a story. Into a story that more or less lays out our hypotheses and some of the linkages between people in biodiversity and greater Yellowstone. And I'd like to do this in the context of a flight around the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Hence our title, a bird's eye view of biodiversity and people in greater Yellowstone. It's a pleasure to acknowledge co-authors in this work. J. Rotella, Alisa Gallant, Matt Kraske and John Wilson from Montana State University and Raleigh Redmond from University of Montana and Warren Cohen from just over west of you at Oregon State University. So let's consider that we're in Boseman, Montana that would that pointer be handy? Not right now. I can get along without it. So Boseman sits way up at the top of this and let's just figure that we'll take a flight clockwise around the ecosystem. This is a shaded relief map from the back. It might not be obvious that the green are the low elevation areas and yellow are the increasingly high elevation places. And the main thing you would, if you were in an airplane flying around this and were looking back towards the ecosystem you would notice that it's basically a high plateau that mountains and high plateaus characterize the Yellowstone ecosystem and these are periodically cut by river valleys that drain from the mountain areas down into the surrounding plains. Now that fact alone that this is a very topographically structured system I think is going to tell us a whole lot about the ecology of the system. Particularly about how climate and soils are distributed in the system and possibly about how biodiversity is distributed. So if we continue flying around we'll come to this northwest section of the ecosystem. That's where our studies have been focused in this hatched area. Here again is Yellowstone Park and now let's consider that we've landed in west Yellowstone and we're standing right here and we're going to be looking up into Yellowstone Park. Alright, thank you. So hard to see from the back but this is the overall ecosystem and we're basically looking right into the park from the west side and so in this case this is a shaded relief map blue is low elevation, yellow is high elevation and we're looking from west Yellowstone due west right into the park. This is the boundary between Yellowstone Park and the adjacent lands and if you're close enough to see you'd see that we're looking up the Madison River drainage and into the fire hole area where Madison River is located and you'll notice that all this culminates in the high Yellowstone plateau. Well it turns out that as you'd expect temperatures vary quite a lot across this elevational gradient. This is a map of mean annual air temperature with the coolest places being in light yellow so up in the Yellowstone plateau and substantially warmer temperatures down in the lowlands. This is about two months long up here and about five months down in the lowlands. We actually have some years up in Yellowstone Park where trees do not put on any annual increment. There's basically no growth in some years up high. Well if we looked at the distribution of vegetation in this system we'd see some correlation with topography and climate and soils. Again you won't be able to see these things given our setting here but Lodgepole pine forests in light green tend to dominate these higher elevation areas that are on poor volcanic soils. Douglas fir is found at mid elevations on somewhat richer soils and then sprinkled into the lowlands in the richest sites are Aspen, Cotton, Wood and Willow these various deciduous communities. Now those cover only about three percent of the study area. For example if you can see it all orange is Aspen and it's just sprinkled around the lowland areas here. What about plant productivity? Well that's depicted here. Again as you would expect net primary productivity is very much lower up in this high relatively soil poor area in Yellowstone Park and areas of highest primary productivity where just localized patches in the lowlands particularly where the good soils are located. So I hope you get the idea that there's fairly strong abiotic patterning here that seems to influence the distribution of vegetation cover type and also influence site quality plant primary productivity. What we're curious about is what might that mean for distribution of species in this system? It turns out that for those of us that are vertebrate ecologists we have mostly looked at plant cover type and serial stage and structure as main correlates with patterns of bird species richness. It's true for mammals and amphibians and so forth as well. And it turns out of course that most of our conservation plans and most of our management plans are based on vegetation cover type and serial stage really mattering. The spotted owl plan and this region might be an example of that. In recent years there have been a small number of studies that have had some very interesting results in how abiotic factors might be influencing patterns of species diversity. Just for example this is what I think will either is now or soon will become a query who looked at vertebrate species richness across North America and looked for correlations with a variety of environmental variables most of them relating to climate. And he found various climate variables were strongly correlated with vertebrate richness. In this case potential of apotranspiration explained over 91% of the variation in species richness. Now, PET is in simplest terms a measure of the ability of the atmosphere to evaporate water. It's largely driven by the heat dynamics of the system. And Currie would suggest that this relationship is underlaid by the fact that systems that are relatively warm and have lots of energy can support larger numbers of species, the nose areas that have less energy. And that energy would both be that that would influence the thermal properties of the species as well as energy that would influence primary productivity which would in turn influence food availability for vertebrates. Now it turns out this has been sort of developed into what's known as the energy availability. Hypothesis. I'd like to just show you one overhead. This energy availability hypothesis is one of about seven of the major hypotheses that have been offered for explaining patterns of species diversity around the world. And I just want to make the point that for almost all of these you can suggest that abiotic factors relate either directly or indirectly influence these. For example under energy availability we just indicated that characteristics of the atmosphere influence energy availability in terms of environmental stress or environmental stability. Again the notion is that climate or soils directly influences patterns of diversity. Even for things like this as a structuring force for diversity you probably are extremely familiar with the fact that topography and climate very strongly influences the expression of many types of disturbance. And so there's an indirect association between abiotic factors and richness via disturbance. And of course disturbance strongly affects habitat complexity another major hypothesis for what drives species richness. So you can suggest that there's a good potential that climate soils topography underlay most of these even abiotic interactions like competition. Various studies have found that competitive relationships between species tend to change from one soil type to another or from one climate regime to another. Now I just sort of came across this last week and said wow for all of our traditional hypotheses on what structure species diversity pretty much all have a strong potential of relating to climate soils topography. Now what's amazing about that is how seldom any of us vertebrate people actually measure climate or soils or topography and that this would suggest that possibly we could improve predictive power for where species are going to be located by considering some of these abiotic factors. Okay let's get back to Yellowstone and see if this makes any sense in that context. We've been sampling birds across cover types and elevations and serial stages in the Yellowstone ecosystem and what we've been finding is a fairly striking relationship between various measures of elevation. Now for example if we just restrict the analysis to mature lodgepole pine and look at the effects of elevation so we're basically controlling for structural attributes and for cover type and looking at the effects of elevation we see that the total bird abundance is strongly correlated with elevation of course decreasing it to higher elevations this explains about 50% in bird abundance and the same is true with bird species richness as indicated here explaining about 64% of the variation and it held this relationship held for several of our individual species. Now this is kind of striking because if we were all walking on that west side of Yellowstone Park and we looked at the lodgepole pine vegetation around us we'd be hard pressed to say whether we were above 8,000 feet or below 7,000 feet just based on the vegetation. The vegetation doesn't obviously convey whatever it is that the birds are responding to along this elevational gradient and what we're hypothesizing is that either climate itself is directly influencing bird abundance in the system or abiotic factors are influencing primary productivity which in turn then is influencing food availability to insectivorous birds and influencing their abundance. Now I lay those out all as hypotheses because we haven't collected the data to test those hypotheses but we haven't fully done the analyses so hopefully in a few months we'll be able to offer some more insights on specifically what underlays this elevational relationship. If we look at these cover types, something most of us are more familiar with we see strong relationships as all of you would expect we find that cottonwood, aspen and willow have just about twice as much bird species richness and total abundance as any of the lodgepole pine cover types or sage or grassland. Moreover about 25% of our bird species specialize on those deciduous habitats. About 24 out of 100 species are strongly associated with those habitats. Why might that be? We're hypothesizing that it's because these deciduous habitats occur on the very best sites and are quite high in primary productivity for one but also these habitats have high levels of structural richness many different canopy layers and that we're suggesting that there's interesting interactions between vegetation structure which we've all spent a lot of time studying and things like primary productivity and that our high elevation lodgepole sites beautiful old growth stands lots of structural complexity there's no birds in them we think because primary productivity is so low that there's simply no food a lot of the lowland grasslands are in good soils very high rates of primary productivity but again low bird species richness we're suggesting because there's relatively little structural complexity there and the interaction of high levels of structure and high levels of primary productivity might explain these the so-called hot spots for bird abundance and bird species diversity. Well how might this play out over the landscape in terms of influencing patterns of bird species richness? Well this figure is one that we're sort of proud of because it took a lot of work to produce it it's a extrapolation of bird species richness across our study area and we developed it by first quantifying vegetation patterns over the study area using Landsat imagery and then sampling birds as I said in about a hundred sites that are stratified by cover type and serial stage in elevation and then developing statistical functions to predict bird species richness across the entire landscape now places that are white here are low in species abundance in species richness and deepest reds are places that are highest in bird species richness you'll notice again the outline of Yellowstone Park here if you could see this well and looked at where the places that are deep red first thing that strikes you is not much of this landscape is deep red species richness is not high over most of the landscape and the places where it is relatively high mostly is outside of our crown jewel of national parks lower elevations on those better sites a third thing you might notice is that these hot spots are small in size and they're quite isolated from each other they tend to be peppered out suggesting that connectivity among them might be a real issue this map I think has a lot of implications for management and conservation and I like to come back to that near the end of the talk but right now let's continue on our flight and let's get back in the plane and take off from West Yellowstone and just fly up over that Madison Valley and up over the Yellowstone Plateau past Old Faithful and take a look down what we would see is an incredible amount of that landscape that's been burned by wildfire so we're now circling around this area and we know about 40% of Yellowstone Park was burned in 1988 through wildfire and the pattern that was inflicted on the landscape by these fires is fairly interesting most of our weatherfronts actually come out of the Snake River drainage and push up to the northeast and hence the fires mostly were initiated on this side of the system and they were blown in long narrow tongues across the ecosystem what that did was leave lots of elongated fairly large patches of unburnt forest in the system those are places that where colonists were able to survive the fire and probably hasten the recovery of those adjacent burn patches now big fires like this have reoccurred about every 200 to 300 years in the system and it's a system that very much is dependent upon crown fire a variety of plants like aspen and of course a variety of animals like blackback woodpecker require these types of fires and this is a classic example of a dynamic landscape where natural disturbance is shaping a mosaic of habitats through space and time maintaining native species how do humans fit into this landscape? let's start with the earliest homesteaders it's kind of neat in that system maybe here too where you can still see the earliest cabins that were built by the homesteaders and get an idea of where they actually had settled and the impression I get is that the settlers tended to first occupy those places in the landscape that had the more music climatic conditions access to water and so forth so mostly these lowland more riparian oriented settings were probably the first occupied and that our current patterns of private land ownership largely reflect that habitat selection criteria that was used by the early settlers towns like bozeman won't be able to see that but this is the gallatin valley and it's a very productive setting pretty much all the large towns in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem are located in these very fertile low elevation valleys well where did the national parks go then? well by default they were placed at the higher elevations the sites that had not been settled by the earliest people and to sort of demonstrate that this is just a frequency distribution of land ownership by elevation so red is private and we go from low elevation to high elevation and you see a majority of private land is at these lower elevation areas the greeners are national park lands in the ecosystem and they tend to be at these higher elevations one result of that is this gradient in human land use from the high elevation to the low elevation areas if we continued our flight down the south side of the Yellowstone and flew up or along the west boundary of Yellowstone park we'd look down on this basically the Yellowstone park and the boundary with the Targi National Forest where there's been quite extensive clear cut logging in the system well it turns out that this logging we tried to reconstruct what places were cut first and so each of these panels reflects a decade from 1950 to 1990 so during the fifties the orange of the places that where the initial logging occurred tended to be down in these lower elevation areas again the park is over on this side and then gradually pushed up to the park boundary but the really heavy cutting wasn't until the 1980s up against that park boundary suggesting that typically we've tended to have our most intense land use lower elevations and gradually have moved up over time well what are the consequences of this type of clear cut logging compared to wildfire in this system one of the things that's kind of neat about Yellowstone is that you do have intense gradients in human activity right aside of intense gradients in natural disturbance it's a nice setting for making comparisons well some of the things we're finding are very closely with what I'm sure you're well versed on in this setting and that is that natural disturbance like wildfire often leaves a lot more biological legacy within stands which probably hastens recovery at the landscape level we're finding that landscape patterns differ quite a lot under wildfire and under logging for example that mean pat size is significantly more variable under wildfire than logging as evidenced here by significant difference in coefficient of variation in pat size and also variation in core area and we found similar results for patch shape of course that variability in pat size and shape are some of the elements of landscape heterogeneity that are probably important for keeping a variety of species with suitable habitats across the landscape so we'd suggest here that the heterogeneity instilled it within stands and across landscapes by natural disturbance supports a very different set of ecological processes and species than those that would come from traditional clear cut logging here for example in blue are the areas that have been clear cut in the targi and in red the places that have burned by wildfire in the park I'm sure you're all familiar with this notion of range of natural variation as a guideline for landscape management the notion being that if we can understand what the pre-settlement disturbance was and the pre-settlement landscape dynamic was that if we can tend to stay within that natural range of variation we should be able to maintain ecological processes and native species that had persisted under those regimes in pre-settlement times how does that idea fit in a crown fire ecosystem like Yellowstone well we try to get at that a little bit by using a computer simulation model to reconstruct vegetation patterns over the the past 200 years or so in parts of the Targi National Forest and then also use that model to project landscape change into the future under different forest management scenarios in the Targi National Forest just for example this depicts about 50 year intervals from 1790 to 1988 and the greens tend to be older serial stages and the oranges and reds younger serial stages and what our model predicted was that most of the landscape tended to be late serial in the late 1700s and that in the mid-1800s there was quite widespread wildfire that converted most of the landscape to seed sapling and pole aged stands those tended to grow into mature stands by the 1950s and then the logging from 1950 to present tended to revert that and push the landscape back more towards an early serial condition so if you just plot one measure of landscape pattern in this case the percent of mature and old growth vegetation cover from 1790 to present what you see is most of the landscape being mature and old growth until the big fires in the mid-1980s where most of it was early serial and then a recovery back towards that later stage and then some decrease with modern logging so here is the so-called natural range variability in mature cover going from about 15% to about 95% and here are five different alternatives in the Targi Forest plan projected out from present 200 years into the future looks to me like all the five of those alternatives are within the natural range of variation from a no-cut scenario to a very high-strength logging scenario I guess in a system like this the suggestion is that it's just way too simplistic to think that being somewhere within a quote natural range of variation is going to accomplish our modern objectives that we really need to carefully consider the spatial scaling spatial patterning of that natural disturbance regime we need to consider the temporal scaling that we can submit isn't enough that we really need to think about these environmental gradients that we've been talking about and human land use patterns and try to merge all those together to come up with management scenarios that we think will best accomplish our current landscape objectives our model doesn't have a fire component to it so there's several limitations in this model that we could talk about later if you care to so I guess I'm going to come back to the notion and I think it's something that those of you that were involved with the Columbia River assessment have hit on some time ago that we probably really need to think about specifically what are our goals for the landscape and try to use first principles if you will to design that landscape to accomplish those objectives natural disturbance offers a good context but some simple notion that we can stay within a settlement range of variation probably isn't going to be very helpful to us alright so let's get back in that airplane and now we're going to fly north and come off the Yellowstone Plateau we're looking due south now so we'll be coming down off the mountains down the Gallatin Valley and this is the valley that Bozeman has set in we'll notice that the land use will change pretty much from forest management to higher elevations to agriculture as we get into the lowlands and then more and more to rural residential development and then to urban down still further now as I mentioned earlier in much of the northern Rockies there's been a tremendous surge in human population in the last couple of decades largely due to so called urban refugees those people that have enough money to leave Chicago Miami and LA and come to these greater ecosystems because they're such attractive places to live pretty much all we know in Greater Yellowstone is that they're coming but there's been almost no quantification of how many are coming and where are they settling and how are they influencing the ecosystem or how are they influencing the local economy we did a bit of a pilot study just within this region south of Bozeman covering much of the Gallatin Valley up to the foothills here and this is the national forest boundary right here and through aerial photo interpretation tried to reconstruct rates of rural residential development over the past 40 years or so and I just want to show you a series of aerial photographs from one place to get an idea of what types of change has occurred and you might focus on this riparian strip of vegetation right here you'll notice here in 1959 that most of the valley bottom here was an agriculture with just scattered ranch houses now if we look 20 years later 1979 here is that same strip of riparian vegetation and you'll notice that a subdivision, a large subdivision has gone on right adjacent to that riparian zone and also some along this riparian zone the uplands still tend to be mostly agricultural and then if we look in 1990 we see that again here's that riparian strip that the development in the riparian zone is still expanded but quite importantly even the high elevation bluffs are also getting subdivided at this point when we look at the data in total this depicts the number of family dwellings in this 80 square section study area in 1954 yellow being low density less than 10 houses per square mile and red being the highest density greater than 50 houses per square mile and just to orient you this is the city of Bozeman here and of course it scores high density early on and this is a major highway that goes down into Yellowstone Park and this is another community called Gallatin Gateway but otherwise it was low density across most of the valley in the 1950s by 1979 you'll notice that the highway corridors had increased human density but notice this pushing down towards the foothills to the south there's also an increase in density and by 1990 there's quite a dramatic surge in rural residential development in this forest valley bottom interface right up against the national forest now these data end at 1990 but we looked at at some county records sewage hookups so we call this the faecal data set turns out that the only way you can figure out how many houses have been built in that area is to try to dredge through the county records and see to see what data they might have that's relevant in our area for some reason they keep track of sewage permits and that's the way to track who's built the house, where anyway what you can notice here this red line is the cumulative number of houses in this county from 1970 to 1995 notice that since 1990 there's been quite a surge the rate of growth is increasing quite dramatically in that area right now and I think this is typical for several places in the northern Rockies now I guess our core hypothesis is that people are not settling randomly on the landscape but they're picking certain places to settle that are partially influenced by the ecological characteristics of the landscape specifically we're suggesting that these areas that are hot spots for biodiversity are just the places where people are settling and for example here we depict net primary productivity across the Gallatin National Forest and then into the Gallatin Valley both the towns of Bozeman and Livingston here you'll notice the highest productivity is in these lowland areas and then here we have relative human population density and you can see a pretty strong correlation between the darkest greens and the darkest reds suggesting that people are tending to settle in these most productive places well what are the consequences of that for native species well obviously to the extent that there is conversion of these hotspot habitats to agriculture or to rural residential we're reducing the area of these hotspot habitats but we think that there's even more subtle impacts that may be going on for example we're quite interested in bird population viability and hence we've been studying bird reproductive success and what we had expected was that these hotspot habitats places where birds are very abundant and where there's lots of species that they would also be places where there's high reproductive success and that they could be population source areas producing lots of offspring that would then move out into the lower quality habitats and basically maintain a viable regional population now it turns out that our cottonwood habitats were our hottest of hotspots we had the most species and the most abundance but when we went and actually sampled bird reproductive success we had a surprise now we did it both by using artificial nests which is shown in green here and by using real bird nests which is shown in red that the trends tend to be the same among these two different types of study methods but what you'll note here is that bird reproductive success was quite high in these aspen habitats but one of the hotspot types well above what we think would make it a population source area where reproduction is higher than estimated survival rates look at cottonwood however much lower reproductive success probably below what's necessary to maintain the current population so this suggests that these cottonwood sites might be sort of sink areas the suggestion being that all hotspots are created equal well what might it be about these cottonwood habitats it turns out in our study area that all the cottonwood habitats are down in the agricultural land they're along the larger rivers they're surrounded by ag land and it turns out that bird predators, nest predators are much more abundant in cottonwood for example blackbill magpie is quite substantially more abundant in cottonwood than willow and aspen and the same with brown headed cow birds which of course are brood parasites much higher in cottonwood than these other two types these are both species that do well in a mixed agricultural semi-native landscape and the suggestion here is even though those cottonwood habitats haven't been visibly altered by development just the fact that they're a side of rural residential areas and agricultural areas is altering the predator community with a large impact on reproductive success and bird population viability in these hotspot habitats so let's sort of wrap things up here with some possible management conclusions I think it's quite intriguing that people tend to be attracted to these sorts of greater ecosystems because of their natural value but because of the socio-economic profile of the people that are moving there they tend to be folks that want to live out in those aspen groves and out in those riparian areas that people are tending to settle in just the places that are most important for native species and maybe loving the system to death if you will so the real question is how might we manage a system like this so that we both can maintain ecological communities here but at the same time there's some quality of life and the socio-economic people are suggesting that those things are strongly linked that our economy is doing so well partially because of the natural amenities that are in the system so there's a strong economic incentive to keeping the ecosystem healthy is what a lot of economists would suggest in this area anyway how might we do that well just some thoughts are first it would seem important to identify these hot spots so that we can set up conservation plans that would allow us to maintain those habitats and those species that are dependent upon them it's quite obvious it's also important I think to know what actually causes those places to be hot spots what are those underlying factors that cause certain places to be good and other places not if you know that you can actually try to manage those places to enhance those values if vegetation structure matters on high productivity sites then maybe we can manage those places to maintain that it's also important to use this knowledge for mapping these hotspot habitats because that will allow us to identify hotspots that we don't know about yet and it should allow us to identify potential hotspots places that have the right abiotic conditions but where vegetation has been altered that allows us to try to use restoration techniques to bring those back into an appropriate habitat condition and in this regard I personally am quite excited about the idea of trying to use abiotic factors in primary productivity as new filters for conservation planning instead of only mapping distribution of cover type and serial stage we're thinking that we can learn a lot by also mapping climate soils topography and using that as a basis for coming up with management regimes across the landscape it's certainly important not to omit the human component it's important to know what land uses are occurring where and what their impacts are because that knowledge with knowledge of the ecosystem allows us to basically do risk assessments determine which places in the landscape are most important for native species and processes which of those places are most likely to be altered by human activity and hence evaluate those places that are most at risk allowing managers to give them high priority for management activities we think that this type of knowledge is going to be helpful a wide variety of groups groups like the Nature Conservancy have to decide which private lands to get conservation easements on knowing where the hotspots are and which are most under threat would help them similarly county planners all across the northern Rockies are just pulling their hair out as you probably well know because their counties are growing like mad and zoning and planning is really underdeveloped in a lot of these places they don't know what subdivisions are proven which not this type of data could help them make some of those types of decisions there's a lot of private landowners that actually consider biodiversity to be important and would like to know what strategies they can take to keep native species in their places this knowledge would help them and then as a lot of you are in federal agencies you're well aware of how this sort of information could help try to lead to coordinated interagency management where you would actually try to manage the upland national forest land in conjunction with some of these lowland hotspots in order to accomplish your objectives well I've tended to try to couch most of what I said in terms of hypotheses because the definitive studies have not been done by any means in our system more or less I'm laying out what we think is going on and what we really need is a lot more work to actually test these relationships and understand them we've developed various proposals for doing that and some of the key pieces of that and I suspect they overlap a lot with the pieces of the Columbia River Assessment though on a much different scale these pieces are laid out here first trying to reconstruct past interactions among people in ecosystems understanding where people have settled what impacts they've had in relation to patterns of biodiversity using that reconstruction from past to present as a way to actually test specific hypotheses and then whenever we try to look to the past we always say oh gosh I wish we had measured climate every year I wish we had measured where people are settling well now that we know some of the things we like to measure it's appropriate it seems to me to set up monitoring protocols where we now get that information over three years from now we have the information that we want to make these decisions and all of this allows risk assessments to be done sort of rate which places in the landscape are of greatest concern and most merit management and conservation attention projecting alternative futures seems important using simulation models and other approaches to actually say what would the ecosystem be like with the number of residents in it what would the system be like if we maximize commodity production versus try to maximize native species diversity what would be the economic outcomes of either of those scenarios and finally it's obvious that involving all the different stakeholders is critical on each stage of this sort of process to allow this type of assessment to go forward so I guess I just close by by suggesting that that there's some really interesting new phenomenon that are happening in the northern Rockies right now some of these have probably played out in other places like the eastern U.S. in the past when we weren't able to study them but there's probably a real opportunity here to try to understand these interactions and try to mold the future where we can both maintain these wonderful ecosystems that we all have come to love so much at the same time maintaining the human communities that are in those areas thanks very much