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Species at Risk on  DOD Installations

Methods

Nationwide
  Assessment

Military Services

Installations

Buffer Analysis

Conclusion

Future Directions

Species at Risk on DOD Installations > Summary

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Department of Defense lands play an essential role in maintaining homeland security, and are also important for safeguarding the nation's natural heritage. Managing Department of Defense lands in a way that both supports military readiness and sustains ecological integrity requires an understanding of the species and ecosystems that are found on and around these bases. The information and analyses supplied in the report by NatureServe and its member natural heritage programs provides the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) with key findings about species at risk on military bases. For this study, we define species at risk on DOD installations to be: (1) plant and animal species that are not yet federally listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, but that are either designated as candidates for listing or are regarded by NatureServe as critically imperiled or imperiled throughout their range AND (2) with populations that are known to occur on or near DOD installations.

Department of Defense lands are thought to support more federally listed species than any other major federal agency, and to harbor more imperiled species than lands managed by either the National Park Service or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Groves et al. 2000). Proactive conservation of imperiled species and their habitats on and around DOD installations can help preclude the need for federal listing, reduce recovery costs, and protect significant biological diversity, while enabling the services to continue providing high quality military training. NatureServe's work in this report is intended to assist the military in focusing conservation efforts on high priority installations and towards high priority species at risk that may warrant federal listing if population declines occur or continue.

The key findings of our assessment are:

• Of 523 species at risk found to occur on DOD installations, 47 are federal candidates, 136 are regarded by NatureServe as critically imperiled, and 340 are imperiled;
• Twenty-four species at risk appear to be restricted to individual DOD installations. Overall, 82 species at risk have at least half of their occurrences residing on individual installations;
• Geographic patterns for species at risk on military lands conform to nationwide patterns of species imperilment (Chaplin et al. 2000), with particularly high numbers of at-risk species occurring on installations in Hawaii, central and southern California, southern New Mexico, and parts of Florida;
• Geographic patterns of species at risk density further emphasize the importance of conservation efforts on installations in Hawaii, California, and Florida;
• Of the 729 DOD installations analyzed in this report, 224 (30%) contain species at risk, representing a total of 523 different species;
• In terms of total numbers, Army installations contain almost twice the number of at-risk species as Air Force and Navy installations. In terms of species at risk density, Army and Navy installations contain roughly three-fold greater densities than do Air Force, Marine Corps, and Army Corps of Engineers installations;
• The majority (67%) of these species at risk on a national basis are vascular plants.

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