Lit Review Central: Combining comprehensive knowledge of species habitat associations and vital population rates to map population viability

If you had access to practically everything published about a species at the touch of a button and it was organized in a simple, tabular format… how would you use it? This is the fortunate question we face as peer-reviewed literature becomes better organized and accessible through advances in bioinformatics and popular use of the Internet. The Biodiversity and Spatial Information Center at North Carolina State University is tackling the question by exploring ways to integrate published studies of species’ vital population rates and density estimates within a spatially-explicit (mappable) framework. One important component to this project is the development of a database to summarize literature reviews, where each record can be queried for information describing a study’s date and location, method of data collection, species studied, land cover types and landscape relationships (e.g., patch size, distance to water), as well as qualitative descriptions of habitat suitability and quantitative demographic parameters (e.g., density, daily nest survival) under those conditions. Our approach for integrating these data builds upon habitat suitability modeling by first ranking published vital population rates and spacing relationships for a species’ population viability and density, respectively, on a scale of 0 to 1. However, our rankings are objectively defined by comparing each published value within the statistical distribution of all published values for each species. Rankings are linked to spatially explicit conditions via study area descriptions where data were collected. These spatially-explicit rate and density suitability indices provide standardized values that can be stratified by different attributes and lumped for use in statistical analyses and mapping applications. It is our hope this presentation will stimulate imagination and collaboration to refine these methods as well as build upon existing species bibliographies.