Coastal sage scrub case study

In ecological applications of large-scale spatial data to management decisions concerning land planning and conservation, errors and biases may creep into the analysis and decision making at several steps (see Chaps. 1, 2, and 3), including:

1. •

   Uncertainty in positions of spatial locations of relevant ecological and physiographic features of the landscape.

2. •

   Uncertainty of the type and attributes of land cover at a particular location.

3. •

   Uncertainty in how different land covers at a position in space and the geometric arrangement of land covers nearby might influence an animal species occurrence or distribution, or the magnitude of some ecological process.

4. •

   Uncertainty about the relative importance of each spatial location to the overall success or persistence of a population or ecological process.

5. •

   Uncertainty about how to weight each species or ecological process in determining the overall biodiversity and functioning of ecosystems, local and national resource priorities, and consistency with legislative mandates. We would like to be able to quantify the errors at each step, identify biases, and pass these along to the next analysis step so that our degree of uncertainty regarding potential outcomes is evident at each level (e.g., Stoms et al. 1992).