Spatial Risk Assessment Across Large Landscapes with Varied Land Use: Lessons from a Conservation Assessment of Military Lands

Spatial decision‐support tools are necessary for assessment and management of threats to biodiversity, which in turn is necessary for biodiversity conservation. In conjunction with the U.S. Geological Survey—Biological Resources Division's Species at Risk program, we developed a GIS‐based spatial decision‐support tool for relative risk assessments of threats to biodiversity on the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range and Fort Bliss (New Mexico and Texas) due to land uses associated with military missions of the two bases. The project tested use of spatial habitat models, land‐use scenarios, and species‐specific impacts to produce an assessment of relative risks for use in conservation planning on the 1.2 million‐hectare study region. Our procedure allows spatially explicit analyses of risks to multiple species from multiple sources by identifying a set of hazards faced by all species of interest, identifying a set of feasible management alternatives, assigning scores to each species for each hazard, and mapping the distribution of these hazard scores across the region of interest for each combination of species/management alternatives. We illustrate the procedure with examples. We demonstrate that our risk‐based approach to conservation planning can provide resource managers with a useful tool for spatial assessment of threats to species of concern.