What percentage of Northern Goshawk nesting habitat in northwestern Montana is on private or public land? Which species of reptiles, amphibians, birds or mammals in the state are predicted to have fewer than 25,000 acres of protected habitat? How intensely is a given forested area likely to be used by humans?

The answers to these and many more questions can be found in the wide-ranging work of the Wildlife Spatial Analysis Lab at UM, part of the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit. The lab, directed by Roland Redmond, wildlife biology research associate professor, focuses on projects that make innovative use of satellite imagery and geographic information systems technology to provide a bird’s eye view of the state with regard to land cover, species distributions and human population for managers in both the public and private sectors.

One of the lab’s largest efforts to date has been the Montana Gap Analysis Project, undertaken for the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey, which is supporting similar projects in other states. The mission of the national Gap Analysis Program is to promote conservation of biodiversity by identifying how land cover and vertebrate species are distributed with respect to land ownership and management. In this context, Redmond says, “Gap” refers to the identification of gaps in current efforts to manage and protect vertebrate biodiversity.

For the past nine years, Redmond and a team of 14 researchers have worked to compile or develop all the information needed to identify those gaps, including statewide maps of land cover, terrestrial vertebrate distributions, and land ownership and management. It was not a simple task.

First, image analysts stitched together satellite images of the entire state, each color coded based on elevation and the spectral reflectivity. In a two-stage process, 50 different land-cover types were identified, including a variety of grasslands, forest types, shrublands, riparian habitat and barren areas.

Another group of researchers integrated the land-cover map with detailed information gleaned from the literature and some 50 reviewing biologists on the 425 species of native terrestrial vertebrates living in Montana — in particular, their habitat requirements for breeding and foraging. The combined information was used to map the predicted distributions of species in the state.

Finally, they overlaid the predicted wildlife maps with data on who owns the land and how it is managed. This information was combined into four levels of stewardship. Level-one lands, such as wilderness areas and national parks, are managed most intensively for biodiversity, while level-four lands have no formal protection.

Redmond admits that the sheer amount of information compiled in the Gap dataset is daunting, but he has several suggestions for its use.

One important application, he says, would be to help determine through objective criteria which species are in trouble and deserve extra management attention — politics aside. Although the Montana Natural Heritage Program identifies 70 species of terrestrial vertebrates that appear to bear watching, the Montana Gap data show that of the 425 terrestrial vertebrate species living in the state, at least half live in relatively unprotected habitat and/or are relatively scarce in numbers.

Finally, because humans are such a crucial factor for management, Redmond’s group has used a similar approach to predict human impacts on the landscape using census data and road and trail maps. The intersection of predicted wildlife richness with predicted human impacts can show where future conflicts are most likely to occur, he says.