Adirondacks region stands out as conservation leader on national biodiversity map
By Cayte Bosler
Deep red spells doom on a new national map of wild things.
The color scale ranges from dark green to blood red based on how much biodiversity has declined in the continental United States, showing areas of risk for plants and animals threatened with extinction. In the Northeast, the Adirondacks offer refuge to eyes combing the map, with its pop of bright green in the troubling vastness of red.
The map, published by the New York Times, resulted from a partnership between Esri, a pioneer in digital mapping, and NatureServe, a nonprofit conservation research group. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t save it,” goes the sustainability axiom.
Visuals like these offer policymakers and the public a chance to understand where species are most imperiled and then act.
Without intervention, places shaded with red remain vulnerable to losing nonhuman life. Based on a complex collection of data like species distribution, population size, and habitat preference, this comprehensive picture is like a report card for biodiversity – the variety of species and their genetic diversity in an ecosystem. Green areas on the map have achieved a level of protection for wildlife and plants that has become mostly aspirational for much of the country.
Adirondacks are a bright spot
The Adirondacks arguably serve as a world-class model and an originator in the United States for how to manage public lands to conserve nature. Conservation values are codified in the 1894 New York State Constitution’s “forever wild” clause. That landmark decision sprung forth the natural bounties evident on the map compared to the rest of the state and, even more so, the rest of the nation.
These strict environmental guidelines help block the decline of wildlife whose leading threat globally is habitat destruction. Because environmental protections are enshrined in the state’s constitution, it is a lot more difficult to amend, bend or ignore compared with other national legislation such as the United States’ Endangered Species Act (ESA), or even the Global Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), a framework without binding laws.
According to the United States Geological Survey, about 13% of the country is classified as protected and managed for biodiversity. The Biden administration wants that number to reach 30%, as part of the planetary push known as “30 by 30,” to bolster legal protections for 30% of the world’s land and waters by 2030.
Biodiversity seen as buffer against climate change impact
The study behind the biodiversity map comes on the coattails of a damning report produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in sections over the first week of March. It’s the most comprehensive assessment on climate change since 2014 and makes plain that without significant, coordinated action, the world is on track to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming – a threshold that scientists warn is likely to usher in catastrophic and irreversible effects. “Any further delay,” the report states, and humans miss a chance to “secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”
That future must include the nonhuman world, too, the report emphasizes. If protected by sound policy and land management practices, intact ecosystems brimming with biodiversity could also protect us. As biodiversity declines, human communities are more vulnerable to sudden environmental shifts like floods, droughts, wildfires and an increased risk of invasive species disease, a lack of fresh water and healthy food.
“If you were to remove parts from a computer or car randomly, everyone knows that both those systems will become less reliable or very likely stop working,” said Shahid Naeem, director of the Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability. “The same thing happens to ecosystems when they lose their species.”
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The Adk is under severe attack, degrading the enviroment and the APA is a leading issue. They are ignoring local residents, not having public discussions, selling out to rich entities and opening Quarries, mines, huge rv parks, marinas, building developements on edges of water shed areas. Not dealing with huge issues like 2-stroke snowmobiles, outboards, emitting CO, smoke,massive noise and oil sheens on lakes. not restricting petrol outboards on small lakes or limiting out board size, resulting in huge wakes destroying shorelines, shore nesting birds, excessive noise pollution, smoke and oil. there should be a ban on gasoline boats on most lakes, allowing canoing and electric trolling motors.
why jerks feel like they should bring 150 hp bass boat to tiny ponds and blast across with huge wakes and think its funny to swamp people. chase off the loons and animals.
Glad to have you covering this important topic for AdkExplorer.
Even our enshrined “forever wild” clause won’t be able to protect the park from global warming. Let’s hope our moose aren’t replaced by winter ticks.
https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/opinion/a-stupid-species
https://www.nhpr.org/science/2017-08-01/climate-change-is-the-leading-cause-of-moose-and-loon-population-decline-in-new-hampshire#stream/0
No, a phrase won’t protect the Park from climate change. But wild places have always changed as climates changed. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still wild. The Adirondack-type biome is moving northward. Southern biomes are moving in to replace it. But we need to stay out of the way of climate change and let Nature take care of the details. Species diversity will definitely change, and a healthy Forest Preserve will encourage this diversity.
The key to the Forest Preserve is that the more species diversity it has now, the more gradual and healthy the transition to a different climate(s) will be. There is nothing we can do to help it really, other than trying to keep invasive non-native species from damaging the Park too quickly. A healthy Park now will likely lead to a healthy – albeit different – Park in the future.
I’m happy to see this article in the Explorer, and the NatureServe research recently covered by the New York Times is impressively thorough and monumentally important. However, as acknowledged by the authors of that study, there are caveats for using the data to draw local conclusions. Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the Adirondack Park.
Firstly, the study is heavily skewed towards range-restricted species–specifically globally-rare species (rank G1 & G2). And while this is a reasonable approach for guiding nationwide conservation planning, such species are severely underrepresented in the Adirondacks and heavily represented in the “endemic zones” of the American South and West. There are numerous known occurrences of species within the Adirondack Park that are rare locally or regionally, but not globally, and many of these are even vulnerably located on roadsides and trailsides. This type of biodiversity is by and large not considered in the study.
Second, the study methodology dictates that the vast majority of Forest Preserve lands are automatically green-lit as completely protected against biodiversity threats (as Gap Status 2 management areas), when in fact this is not necessarily the case. For example, the accompanying map by NatureServe for “Protection-weighted Range-size Rarity of Imperiled Species in the United States” (reproduced at the top of this article) highlights the Whiteface Mountain Ski Center Intensive Use Area (Gap Status 4) as one of the Adirondacks’ sole areas of unprotected biodiversity importance (AUBIs), presumably due to the documented presence there of a population of a globally-rare (G2) alpine plant species. As per above, the adjacent Wilderness Areas (Gap Status 2) are automatically eliminated from consideration as AUBIs. And yet, not only do the alpine summits of these areas essentially contain the remaining populations of globally-rare plant species known from anywhere within the Park, but those populations face the notorious threat of extirpation by hiker trampling!
And lastly, all of this taken out of context is missing the point. Selective preservation may be ideally suited to protection of range-limited species, but as a larger conservation strategy, it should be viewed as a last resort. The most effective environmental stategy is land management that averts the need for widespread ecological interventionism in the first place. And even if it may appear that we are long past the point of no return, this milestone is a moving target. Many of the rare and extinct species of today were commonplace in the not-so-distant past. If there is anything that history should teach us, it is that the most valuable aspects of our environment–and the greatest threats–are those that we aren’t thinking about right now. Without a holistic strategy, we’re going to be plugging holes in the ecological barrel until there is little left.
“Many ask, where are the rarest, the best, the most threatened species? But the Adirondack Park does not have a high proportion of extremely rare plant species… Suppose we decided to protect those highest levels of uniqueness. We would be protecting only tiny amounts of the habitat–wonderful, special places–but we would have excluded the entire ecological mainstream! So, the most inclusive approach is to consider animals and plants that are not rare everywhere, that are very common here, but are not common anywhere else… These plants contain messages about what makes the region special, and even unique.” –Jerry Jenkins (“Looking for Answers: From Bog Sedges and Yellow Bellied Flycatchers to Alpine Azalea and Lynx: An Exploration of Biodiversity in the Adirondack Park”, The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, 1994).