Bombing for Biodiversity in the United States: Response to Zentelis & Lindenmayer 2015

Abstract

Zentelis & Lindenmayer (2015) contend military training areas (MTAs) “have the potential to make a significant formal contribution to biodiversity conservation,” yet their conservation value has not been rigorously assessed. We believe their paper is an important step in raising awareness of the potential conservation value of MTAs to policy makers, scientists, and conservation professionals. Here, we offer an empirical evaluation of their statements regarding size, distribution, and representation of ecological systems (i.e., vegetation communities) within MTAs for the contiguous United States (CONUS) by comparing MTAs with lands managed by other U.S. federal agencies. We used lands managed by Department of Defense (DoD) as a proxy for MTAs. By combining the Protected Areas Database of the U.S. (PAD-US; USGS-GAP 2012) and the National GAP Land Cover (USGS-GAP 2011), we determined total number of ecological systems across all units of DoD and other agencies; and proportion of each ecological system that each agency represents across all lands. DoD lands occur in every state (Figure S1) and represent 467 of 565 total ecological systems within CONUS on 8.1 million hectares (Table S1). This ecological diversity is exceeded only by the National Park Service (NPS), which represents 479 ecological systems across 10.2 million hectares. In contrast, U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, despite being 8.5 and 8.6 times larger than DoD lands, represent only 458 and 293 ecosystems, respectively. Therefore, even though DoD lands comprise only 5% of the total area of federal lands, they represent 82.6% of the diversity