Researcher in the Colorado Plateau of western North America

The Colorado Plateau of western North America is home to numerous localized and rare populations of plant species, many of which are listed under the Endangered Species Act. The conservation and management challenge, then, is to design strategies that allow access to energy on public lands while maintaining healthy populations of the co-located plant species. Such an effort relies heavily on models that provide spatially explicit maps (i.e., showing precise locations) of known and predicted locations of rare and sensitive plants in relation to existing and proposed energy development. The Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit is developing models to allow decision makers to compare different trade-offs comparing plant biological costs versus energy development costs.