Stewardship

Objectives

1. To develop or obtain a complete digital map (coverage) of land ownership boundaries that describe: a) public land ownership categories and their internal biodiversity management area (land unit) boundaries; b) voluntarily provided private biodiversity management areas; and c) the entities responsible for management of all identified land units.
2. To attribute each mapped land unit with categories of management status 1 through 4 (and subcategories, if desired), for the purpose of describing the management status of elements of biodiversity and identifying potential gaps. The four biodiversity management status categories can generally be defined as follows:

Status 1: An area having permanent protection from conversion of natural land cover and a mandated management plan in operation to maintain a natural state within which disturbance events (of natural type, frequency, intensity, and legacy) are allowed to proceed without interference or are mimicked through management.

Status 2: An area having permanent protection from conversion of natural land cover and a mandated management plan in operation to maintain a primarily natural state, but which may receive uses or management practices that degrade the quality of existing natural communities, including suppression of natural disturbance.

Status 3: An area having permanent protection from conversion of natural land cover for the majority of the area, but subject to extractive uses of either a broad, low-intensity type (e.g., logging) or localized intense type (e.g., mining). It also confers protection to federally listed endangered and threatened species throughout the area.

Status 4: There are no known public or private institutional mandates or legally recognized easements or deed restrictions held by the managing entity to prevent conversion of natural habitat types to anthropogenic habitat types. The area generally allows conversion to unnatural land cover throughout.