Rare plants conservation and non-renewable energy development in the Colorado Plateau of western North America: can landscape–scale models actually help?

The Colorado Plateau of western North America contains large energy reserves currently under development or proposed for development. Much of this energy potential is found on public lands. The Plateau is also home to considerable biodiversity, especially rare plant species having limited distribution and localized adaption. We modeled the distributions of 21 plant species currently listed under ESA, or under consideration as sensitive species by management agencies, with an objective of minimizing the spatial conflict between non-renewable energy extraction and plant-specific distributions. Separate species distribution models were constructed for each of the targeted plant species using 5 common modelling algorithms. Ensembles, representing "averaged" model output, were built from the individual models. We next obtained energy extraction potential, as well locations of current and proposed well heads. Using a MARXAN framework, we next ran 4 different scenarios of plant-protection vs. energy development, including 2 maximizing plant protection and 2 maximizing energy extraction. Spatially explicit potential conflicts were then ranked from highest to lowest. Results indicate that upwards of 80% of the higher energy potentials could be realized while affording protection of 80% of the combined modeled and known distributions of the species. Several species had such limited distributions that virtually 100% of their respective ranges were required to meet target conservation goals. Variable land tenure complicates the findings given a mixture of private and state lands co-mingled with Federal lands, each of which has different required legal responses under ESA listing.