Towards a Strategic and Spatially-Explicit Mussel Conservation Assessment and Monitoring Program in Missouri – Our Vision

For threatened and endangered species or assemblages, their rarity and isolation in the landscape play a key role in decision making.   Without a strategic or guiding framework for decision making, identification of risks and threats to widespread species and assemblages can be subjective.  Monitoring programs are also less likely to detect or document significant declines or recovery of the species, while important gaps in monitoring remain unidentified.  Effective management actions for restoration may take place on the landscape; but without any strategic or spatially-explicit framework for applying these tactics, their effectiveness and the ability to learn from experience is hampered.    A strategic and spatially-explicit approach to management based on ecological and physical processes important for overall ecological health of a system can enable cost-effective management and concrete recovery of threatened and endangered species.  A conservation assessment of this kind can occur in stages:  1) identification of meaningful biological units; 2) assessment of risks to those units; 3) identification of threats that contribute to risk; 4) spatially-explicit acknowledgement of core areas of populations strength or assemblage diversity; and 5) development of a spatially-explicit monitoring program that best identifies areas that will be most sensitive to species or assemblage expansion or declines.