CORRESPONDENCE
Bombing for Biodiversity in the United States: Response to
Zentelis & Lindenmayer 2015
Jocelyn L. Aycrigg1 , R. Travis Belote2 , Matthew S. Dietz3 , Gregory H. Aplet4 , & Richard A. Fischer5
1
Department of Fish and Wildlife Sciences, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho, USA
The Wilderness Society, Bozeman, Montana, USA
3
The Wilderness Society, San Francisco, California, USA
4
The Wilderness Society, Denver, Colorado, USA
5
U.S. Army Engineer R&D Center, Environmental Lab, Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA
2
Keywords
Biodiversity; Department of Defense; ecological
systems; military training areas; representation;
United States.
Correspondence
Jocelyn L. Aycrigg, Department of Fish and
Wildlife Sciences, University of Idaho, 875
Perimeter Drive MS-1136, Moscow, ID
83844-1136, USA.
Tel: 208-885-3901; fax: 208-885-9080.
E-mail: [email protected]
Received
6 July 2015
Accepted
14 July 2015
Editor
Edward Game
doi: 10.1111/conl.12197
Zentelis & Lindenmayer (2015) contend military
training areas (MTAs) “have the potential to make
a significant formal contribution to biodiversity conservation,” yet their conservation value has not been
rigorously assessed. We believe their paper is an important step in raising awareness of the potential
conservation value of MTAs to policy makers, scientists, and conservation professionals. Here, we offer an
empirical evaluation of their statements regarding size,
distribution, and representation of ecological systems
(i.e., vegetation communities) within MTAs for the
contiguous United States (CONUS) by comparing MTAs
with lands managed by other U.S. federal agencies.
We used lands managed by Department of Defense
(DoD) as a proxy for MTAs. By combining the Protected
Areas Database of the U.S. (PAD-US; USGS-GAP 2012)
and the National GAP Land Cover (USGS-GAP 2011), we
determined total number of ecological systems across all
units of DoD and other agencies; and proportion of each
ecological system that each agency represents across all
lands.
DoD lands occur in every state (Figure S1) and represent 467 of 565 total ecological systems within CONUS
on 8.1 million hectares (Table S1). This ecological diversity is exceeded only by the National Park Service (NPS),
which represents 479 ecological systems across 10.2 million hectares. In contrast, U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, despite being
8.5 and 8.6 times larger than DoD lands, represent only
458 and 293 ecosystems, respectively. Therefore, even
though DoD lands comprise only 5% of the total area
of federal lands, they represent 82.6% of the diversity
C 2015 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
306 Conservation Letters, July/August 2015, 8(4), 306–307 Copyright and Photocopying: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
J. L. Aycrigg et al.
of ecological systems, whereas USFS and BLM comprise
42% and 43% of the total federal land area, but neither
represents as much diversity as DoD lands. Similarly,
Stein et al. (2008) found DoD lands disproportionately
represented more imperiled species (e.g., vascular plants)
per unit area than other federal lands.
DoD lands also contribute to total representation of
ecological systems on federal lands, as three ecological
systems occur on DoD lands only. These ecological systems are relatively rare (i.e., occur on <10,000 hectares
throughout CONUS) and have >50–100% of their area
on federal lands within DoD. Similar to other federal
agencies, the majority of ecological systems have <10%
of their entire or federal distribution within DoD lands
(Figure S2, USFS is an exception). As part of the entire
collective of federal lands, DoD lands increase federal representation of 50 ecological systems by >5% (Figure S3).
Our results are likely a consequence of a mandate
that DoD lands be intentionally distributed across the
U.S. to train the military under a variety of geographic
conditions. They contrast with lands managed by BLM,
NPS, USFS, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS),
which have been obtained through various opportunities and agency-specific conservation priorities (Aycrigg
et al. 2013) and not specifically established to maximize
biological diversity (Scott et al. 2001). Our empirical analysis of DoD lands within CONUS support the contentions
of Zentelis & Lindenmayer (2015) that DoD lands
(i.e., MTAs) contribute to biodiversity conservation and
should be considered a conservation asset.
Supporting Information
Additional Supporting Information in tables and figures
may be found in the online version of this article at the
publisher’s web site:
Table S1. Total area (in hectares), number (i.e.,
gamma diversity across all units), and unique number of
ecological systems within CONUS among federal agencies. DoD lands (our proxy for MTAs) are the second
most diverse federal land management agency, second
only to the NPS, which contains over 27% more area.
We excluded developed land and open water. These data
are based on the Protected Areas Database of the United
States (PAD-US; USGS-GAP 2012).
Figure S1. Department of Defense lands in the contiguous United States. We excluded developed land and
open water. Lines were thickened to increase visibility of
smaller areas. These data are based on the Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US; USGS-GAP
2012).
Bombing for biodiversity in the United States
Figure S2. Number of ecological systems in each federal land category shown by percent area of the range
(i.e., total area in CONUS) of each ecological system
(top) and shown by percent area across all federal lands
for those ecological systems (bottom). Our federal land
categories are Department of Defense (DoD), Bureau of
Land Management (BLM), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
(FWS), U.S. Forest Service (USFS), National Park Service
(NPS), and other federal lands (Other fed). We excluded
developed land and open water. Based on the Protected
Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US; USGS-GAP
2012).
Figure S3. The distribution of the contribution of Department of Defense (DoD) lands to representation of
ecological systems within CONUS. We calculated representation (i.e., area of each ecosystem on all federal lands
/ total area of each ecosystem across CONUS × 100)
for each ecological system when excluding DoD lands in
the federal collective and including DoD lands. The difference in representation between exclusion and inclusion of DoD lands is considered the contribution of DoD
lands to representation for all 565 ecosystems occurring
within CONUS. One ecological system that increased in
representation to >50.1% when including DoD lands is
not visible. We excluded developed land and open water. Based on the Protected Areas Database of the United
States (PAD-US; USGS-GAP 2012).
References
Aycrigg, J.L., Davidson, A., Svancara, L.K., et al. (2013).
Representation of ecological systems within the protected
areas network of the continental United States. PLoS ONE,
8, e54689. Doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054689.
Scott, J.M., Davis, F.W., McGhie, G., et al. (2001). Nature
reserves: do they capture the full range of America’s
biological diversity. Ecol. Appl., 11, 999–1007.
Stein, B.A., Scott, C., & Benton, N. (2008). Federal lands and
endangered species: the role of military and other federal
land in sustaining biodiversity. Conserv. Biol., 58, 339–347.
US Geological Survey, Gap Analysis Program (USGS-GAP).
(2011). National GAP Land Cover, Version 2. Available
from http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov. Accessed 2 February
2015.
US Geological Survey, Gap Analysis Program (USGS-GAP).
(2012). Protected Areas Database of the United States
(PAD-US), version 1.3. Available from
http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov. Accessed 2 February 2015.
Zentelis, R. & Lindenmayer, D. (2015). Bombing for
biodiversity – enhancing conservation values of Military
Training Areas. Conserv. Lett., doi: 10.1111/conl.
12155.
C 2015 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Conservation Letters, July/August 2015, 8(4), 306–307 Copyright and Photocopying: 307
Supplemental Table 1. Total area (in hectares), number (i.e., gamma diversity across all units),
and unique number of ecological systems within contiguous U.S. (CONUS) among federal
agencies. Department of Defense (DoD) lands (our proxy for MTAs) are the second most diverse
federal land management agency, second only to the NPS, which contains over 27% more area.
We excluded developed land and open water. These data are based on the Protected Areas
Database of the United States (PAD-US; USGS-GAP 2012).
Federal agency
Area (millions Number of
of hectares)
ecological systems
Number of unique
ecological systems
National Park Service (NPS)
10.3
479
4
Department of Defense (DoD)
8.1
467
3
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS)
4.4
460
10
U.S. Forest Service (USFS)
68.7
458
11
Other federal lands
1.5
352
0
293
3
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) 69.8