Element Occurence Acquisition: The Appalachian National Scenic Trail and the Northeast Temperate Network

NatureServe

National Park managers are directed by federal law to know the status and trends in the condition of natural resources under their stewardship in order to fulfill the National Park Service mission of conserving the scenery, and the natural and historic objects and wildlife in national parks unimpaired. In order to fulfill this mission, the Appalachian Trail Park Office (APTO) and the Northeast Temperate Network (NETN) needs to acquire a comprehensive inventory of existing natural resource data that lies on or in close proximity to the Trail. The Appalachian National Scenic Trail traverses 14-states as it follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from Maine to Georgia. Through prior efforts to acquire existing resource data, APTO possesses some of these data, but gaps in the knowledge base exist. The effort described in this proposal is intended to generate a comprehensive dataset from 11 states (including the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA) in the 14 state region. In addition to acquiring data from within the corridor, NatureServe will help to develop a data exchange strategy to keep the dataset that the Northeast Temperate Network is acquiring current as well as a mechanism for the Park Service to submit recent observations to NatureServe's member programs. The element occurrence (EO) is the mapping unit developed by NatureServe's network of member programs for documenting the distribution of species populations. Formally defined as "an area of land and/or water in which a species or natural community is, or was, present," an element occurrence ideally reflects species population units; either a distinct population, part of a population (subpopulation), or a group of populations (metapopulation). NatureServe is linked to its member programs through a process of regular annual data exchanges conducted between NatureServe's Central Databases and each of the individual member programs in the U.S. and Canada. Each month a series of member programs send their data to NatureServe for upload of the past year's updates to status ranking and inventory work. The exchange process includes both taxonomic and status reconciliation. New or updated Element Occurrence data is uploaded to NatureServe and in return centrally developed scientific information is distributed to the state and provincial programs. The primary objective of this project is to acquire element occurrence data from NatureServe state member programs that are located within a corridor that encompasses the Appalachian National Scenic Trail (APPA). The dimensions of the corridor were established by the Northeast Temperate Network for the purposes of identifying significant resources on or in close proximity to the trail, and conveyed to NatureServe as an ArcGIS shapefile coverage. The secondary objective is to develop a standing data exchange protocol intended to ensure that data acquired by either NatureServe, the member programs, or the National Park Service NETN is shared. This protocol will ensure that the datasets held by either organization contains the most current available information.