Steve Carter-Lovejoy, Virginia Natural Heritage Program

Steve Carter-Lovejoy is the natural heritage information manager for the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Back to work after a snow day yesterday. I'm jumping right into scheduling software purchases and installations for early next week, so we can get the Biotics 4 upgrade installed late next week; it looks like it will all pull together somehow, oh boy. Then it'll be time for more questions about our future priorities.

Our conservation sites coverage goes a long way toward adequately representing lands associated with documented natural heritage resources -- but what about the 98 percent of the state that hasn't been closely inventoried for rare species and exemplary communities? Conservation Planner David Boyd is overlaying geology, soils, and land use coverages with digital aerial photography and using GIS to identify areas of suitable habitat for plants associated with an unusual geologic substrate in four counties of northern Virginia. This is the first of what we hope will be a number of GIS coverages identifying those lands with a high potential for containing specific rare species. But these coverages heighten the need for a "negative data" coverage -- inventoried land areas where we're sure that rare species do not occur. So many databases, so little (staff) time!

There's so many species we'll never know about -- an estimated 35,000 invertebrates in Virginia, for instance. A few groups are relatively well-known (butterflies, dragonflies, mussels) and we're trying to extend knowledge in some groups (moths, cave invertebrates) but we'll never know the distribution of invertebrates as well as we know the distribution of birds. To protect biodiversity we can't identify, we call on the concept of "coarse filters." By identifying and protecting excellent examples of all natural community types, we can presume that we've protected most of the organisms associated with those communities. The success of this strategy requires a comprehensive classification of natural communities in Virginia, and we have a strong unit of five ecologists working on this. Community types are not as discrete as species, and almost all of Virginia's landscape has been influenced by human impacts, but we see this challenging work as critical to protecting all of Virginia's biodiversity.

It's probably apparent through what I've written this week that I'm very proud of the Virginia Natural Heritage Program and pleased to be associated with its work. There are several keys to our effectiveness. One is our focus: We're all committed environmentalists, but we filter all activities through our mission, and we don't take on responsibilities that don't directly apply to our goal of protecting biodiversity. Thus I might be personally appalled at the land gobbled up by a large subdivision with a golf course, but if this project is submitted for our review, I won't comment if it won't impact the natural heritage resources that we monitor. This protects our credibility by keeping us out of fights to which we don't have specific scientific knowledge to contribute.

At the same time, we can take strong stands on natural heritage resource issues and rarely have to back down from them, because "facts is facts." It helps that we're not a regulatory agency. Compromises do need to be made in government, to adequately serve the myriad competing interests of the public, but as an independent presenter of scientific data, we can keep the facts on the table in situations when a regulatory agency, needing to compromise for quite legitimate reasons, might try to downplay data to make its compromise stance more comfortable.

Partnerships are a real key to our efficacy and credibility is key to our ability to form successful partnerships. "Rabid" advocacy groups and "cold-blooded" developers alike seek our data. We have developed many specific partnerships, often sealed by bureaucratic-sounding "Memoranda of Agreement" or "Memoranda of Understanding," with state and federal agencies, land trusts, and conservation organizations, that allow us to extend our knowledge and our influence. We partner to gain funding, to gain natural heritage resources data, and to support activities that will result in improved protection and management of natural heritage resources.

In my experience, people want to do the right thing. Building a solid scientific knowledge base and delivering that knowledge to the right people at the right times can help to make sure the right things get done.