Thickleaf Beardtongue (Penstemon pachyphyllus)

The Colorado Plateau of western North America contains large energy reserves under current or proposed development.  The region is also home to numerous localized and rare populations of plant species, many of which are listed under the Endangered Species Act. Our 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. Managers and energy developers can rapidly evaluate plant locations in relation to current energy infrastructure and proposed energy leases, providing the basis for mitigation efforts to protect plant populations while allowing energy extraction to proceed.  The plant distributions, when coupled with information on energy development, also serve as the basis for spatially explicit optimization (most accurate) models evaluating different spatial conservation and energy extraction scenarios.  These optimization models allow decision makers to compare different trade-offs comparing plant biological costs versus energy development costs.