Map of the Month: CLIP

The Critical Lands and Waters Identification Project (CLIP) is a collection of spatial data that identify statewide priorities for a broad range of natural resources in Florida.  CLIP grew out of a request in 2006, by the Century Commission for a Sustainable Florida, for a statewide inventory of natural resource priorities that could inform long range planning decisions.   

CLIP has been developed through a collaborative effort between the Florida Natural Areas Inventory, the University of Florida GeoPlan Center and Center for Landscape Conservation Planning, and the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).  The CLIP partners have relied upon a team of expert advisors from state and federal agencies, water management districts, NGOs, and the private sector, to provide consensus guidance on data compilation and model construction.

CLIP version 3.0 is organized into a set of core natural resource data layers which are combined into five resource categories:  biodiversity, landscapes, surface water, groundwater, and marine.  The first three categories have also been combined into the Aggregated CLIP model, which identifies five priority levels for natural resource conservation.

CLIP database hierarchy.

CLIP and Conservation Planning in Florida

 

CLIP has served to inform a variety of conservation planning projects throughout Florida since version 1.0 was completed in 2008:   

•       CLIP relies heavily on FNAI’s Florida Forever Conservation Needs Assessment, a set of data and analyses funded by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Division of State Lands, that informs Florida’s landmark environmental land acquisition program. 

•       CLIP has been integral to the FWC Cooperative Conservation Blueprint, including a regional version of CLIP produced for the CCB Pilot Project region of south central and southwest Florida.

•       Building on this success, CLIP has been incorporated as the centerpiece of planning by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Peninsular Florida Landscape Conservation Cooperative. 

•       CLIP has also served as the basis for several regional planning projects, including the Heartland 2060 regional visioning project, and the Northwest Florida Greenlinks initiative.

Important Reminders About CLIP

 

•       CLIP is more than a map.  It is a GIS database consisting of 20 core data layers and 4 overlay models.  The Aggregated CLIP Priorities map should not necessarily be used in isolation from its components.  Users may find that different subsets of CLIP data are useful for different purposes.

•       CLIP is a natural resource inventory.  It is not a conservation plan.  The database and report make no recommendations for specific actions for priority areas. Users should not assume that intensive land uses are incompatible with all high priority areas, or that such land uses are always compatible with low priority areas.

•       CLIP is a decision support tool.  CLIP’s primary value is as a screening tool to quickly identify areas with high natural resource value.  Users should then follow up with more thorough study of these areas using a variety of data and sources to confirm the significance of resources.  CLIP can help identify tradeoffs in choosing land use actions on one area compared to another.

CLIP is currently funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with past funding from FWC and the Century Commission, as well as funding from the DEP State Lands for the Florida Forever Conservation Needs Assessment.  For more information about CLIP, including reports, data, and an online map viewer, visit FNAI’s CLIP page.

Species in Focus: Florida’s Red Widow Spider

 All red widow images © DT Almquist 2015, all rights reserved

This beautiful specimen posing at The Nature Conservancy's  Disney Wilderness Preserve after being disturbed in her retreat is a female red widow spider (Latrodectus bishopi), a rarely encountered species of spider that is closely related to black widows (L. mactans and L. variolus). Although they are believed to be as venomous as black widows, very few bites and no deaths have ever been attributed to them. Red widow spiders are one of 16 rare spider species tracked by FNAI, and they have a conservation rank of G2G3, meaning that they are imperiled to vulnerable over their entire range.

This species is endemic to the Florida peninsula, but even there it is only known from relatively few places (see the red stars on the map above), with almost all populations being on the Lake Wales Ridge and a few on the Atlantic Coastal Ridge. It lives primarily in scrub and scrubby flatwoods habitats, of which much has been destroyed. Remaining areas of appropriate habitat that are not properly protected for conservation purposes are threatened by development and poor management. Red widow populations appeared to be unaffected by fire in at least one study (Carrel 2001), but they very likely receive some "...benefit from fire because they nest almost exclusively in palmettos that are only 1-1.5 m high, the sort that are found naturally only in recently burned scrub" (Carrel pers. comm.).

Females construct a very distinctive retreat--where they hide, mate, and guard their eggs--by binding together palmetto leaves with silk. The above female was very protective of her two egg sacs, although not actually aggressive.

Like many spiders, red widows eat mostly insects and catch them in a web.  One study found that in the spring they feed primarily on nocturnal beetles, such as the above glowing click beetle, Deilelater sp., but that later in the year diurnal bees and wasps become more important as prey items. Overall, five species of endemic scarab beetles, which also live primarily in scrub habitat, make up most of their diet (Deyrup and Carrel 2014).

As shown above, the males are smaller and more slender than the female and they usually eat prey that the females capture, although males are capable of capturing their own meal.

Update from the Field: Tracking an Invasive Species

Catclaw mimosa (Mimosa pigra)

Catclaw mimosa (Mimosa pigra) is an invasive exotic plant from Central America which was introduced into Florida as an ornamental plant in the 1920’s.  It currently grows in isolated areas of Highlands, Martin, Palm Beach, Broward, St. Lucie and Okeechobee Counties.  It is a thorny sprawling shrub which can form thickets if unchecked.   It has invaded hundreds of square miles in Australia and Southeast Asia making invaded lands almost unusable.  Like the native species of mimosa, sometimes referred to as “sensitive plant,” the leaflets fold up when they are touched.  Catclaw mimosa can invade many habitats from dry uplands to the deepest swamps but prefers moist to wet places.  It is a Category I plant on the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council’s list of invasive species in Florida and on the US Federal Noxious Weed List and considered one of the 100 World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species by the Global Invasive Species Database.  The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Invasive Plant Management Section (FWC-IPMS) and its predecessors have diligently spent the past 36 years treating it to ensure it does not become a widespread problem in Florida.  

In March 2015, FNAI scientists were asked by FWC-IPMS to survey more than 7,400 acres of conservation lands in Palm Beach and Martin Counties for this species to guide contractors’ upcoming treatment efforts. During this process, FNAI staff walked approximately 600 miles (almost a million meters!) through a variety of uplands, herbaceous marshes and forested swamps.  The good news is that Mimosa pigra does not appear to have expanded its range too much!

Map of transects walked by FNAI biologists on surveys in the Loxahatchee Slough region of southeast Florida.

Map of the Month: Historical Natural Communities of the Apalachicola National Forest

Effective land management for conservation requires an understanding of what the property to be managed was like before any changes due to human activities like logging, agriculture, wetland drainage, road building, or disruption of natural wildfires.  FNAI Biologists have mapped the historical vegetation on 2,414,045 acres of Conservation Lands in Florida to help inform land management.  This map of historical natural communities on the Apalachicola National Forest is based on 1937, 1942, 1952, and present day aerial photography, LiDAR elevation data, soils maps, hundreds of ground-truthed GPS points, and locations of rare species occurrences.  This map served as the basis for an Ecological Condition Model of the Apalachicola National Forest, developed by the US Forest Service.

FNAI contributes a variety of data and analyses to help inform conservation land management decisions.  Together with reference natural communities, historical vegetation maps help land managers set goals for restoration and management of conservation lands across the state.