Planning for Conservation in the Crosstimbers and Southern Tallgrass Prairie Ecoregion

The Nature Conservancy uses ecoregional assessments as the foundation for its other planning and conservation efforts. These assessments are an evaluation of the biodiversity within each ecoregion and a blueprint for conservation action. Each assessment is created using a standardized, science-based methodology (see Conservation by Design ). There are five steps in The Nature Conservancy’s ecoregional planning process, and the Crosstimbers and Southern Tallgrass ecoregional planning team is currently working on the third and fourth steps: setting goals and assessing viability for selected system, community, and species targets. Targets were selected based on input and review by many expert biologists. Final versions of the target lists are available as Adobe .pdf and MIcrosoft Word documents below.

How the Conservation Element Lists Were Created

The hypothesis behind creation of conservation element lists is that a subset of an ecoregion’s species and communities can represent and facilitate conservation of the whole. This is often referred to as the coarse filter/fine filter approach. Fine filters are species, especially those that are rare, endemic, or in decline, and certain very rare community types, particularly those that occur in small patches. Coarse filters are all natural communities and ecological systems characteristic of an ecoregion. By targeting examples of all communities and systems, we hope to also capture the suite of biodiversity those communities and systems support, including species not explicitly listed as conservation elements. In cases where insufficient data exists to allow definition of a conservation element, surrogates may be selected. For example, to compensate for lack of data on aquatic assemblages, remote imagery interpretation may be used to identify stream corridors which can be surrogates for aquatic species.

Files for download:

Crosstimbers and Southern Tallgrass Prairie Map (.pdf - 2121kb)
Crosstimbers and Southern Tallgrass Prairie County Map (.pdf - 237kb)
Communities and Systems Conservation Elements (.doc - 93kb)
Communities and Systems Conservation Elements (.pdf - 204kb)
Plant Conservation Elements (.doc - 38kb)
Plant Conservation Elements (.pdf - 161kb)
Zoology Conservation Elements (.doc - 48kb)
Zoology Conservation Elements (.pdf - 161kb)