Prioritizing Land Management in the Conservation of a Rare Species

The work consists of an analysis of the current habitat of a rare wildflower and a model to predict where it might be reestablished to locate land parcels for potential acquisition and other conservation action.

New England blazing star (Liatris scariosa var. novae-angliae) is a rare grassland perennial species endemic to New England and New York, which occurs primarily along the New England coast. Twelve of Rhode Island’s 13 element occurrences of New England blazing star occur on Block Island, Rhode Island. Some of these populations have fewer than 100 individuals and do not appear to be able to persist on their own.

If New England blazing star persists as a metapopulation on Block Island, then the conservation of both occupied and vacant habitat patches is important to the long-term persistence of the metapopulation. The author identified suitable habitat for New England blazing star using Rhode Island GIS data on soils and land use compiled from aerial photographs. He created a model of long distance dispersal based on an exponential decay function, weighted by the size of each population in 2000. Habitat suitability was combined with the dispersal kernel to create a map of relative colonization likelihood called a “total suitability score.” The mean total suitability score was calculated for each parcel and used to prioritize individual parcels for conservation action. Appropriate conservation actions include landowner outreach and education, the active management of invasive and successional species, and the exclusion of deer.