Finding Non-Native Species Near Protected Lands: A Proximity Tool for BISON

From a U.S. Geological Survey fact sheet of June 2021, prepared with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service.

The Proximity Visualization Tool is a small, lightweight tool that can be placed on web pages to show which non-native species have been recorded near Department of the Interior lands.

How it works

The tool draws on the more than 400 million species occurrence records in BISON (Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation) through the BISON application programming interface. It sends the user's chosen species and area to the API, which returns the records of non-native species near protected areas — as mapped in the Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) — within that area.

The Invasive Species Search panel offers:

• a drop-down of every non-native species known in the United States, from a comprehensive USGS list;
• a drop-down of U.S. counties;
• a box for the search distance, in miles, around the chosen county.

Changing any of these re-runs the search at once. Clicking the map instead moves the search to that spot, ignoring the county, and the map can be zoomed to search small or large protected areas with no limit on distance. On the map, protected lands appear as green outlines, the species' records as markers, and the search area as a box.

What it is — and is not

The tool could be extended to download data, filter records by date, or add state land layers. It was built to demonstrate BISON — both its great benefits and its slight shortcomings — so it is an example only: it has no maintenance, support or adverse-event reporting. It was published on the BISON examples page.

Sources

• Harrison, T.J., Hlavacek, E., and Dieck, J., 2021, Visualizing proximity of non-native species to protected areas of the United States — A proximity visualization tool for BISON: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2021–3027. https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20213027
• The fact sheet cites Simpson and others (2019), the comprehensive list of non-native species, and the USGS Gap Analysis Project's PAD-US 2.0 (2018).
• The screenshot of the tool, on satellite imagery, is not reproduced.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.