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Alternative Futures |
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Evaluation of the Biologic Landscape
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The exceptionally diverse biological landscape of Monroe County is of great scenic and environmental value. This has not gone unnoticed at the national scale. As early as 1923, Monroe County was recommended as part of a large natural reserve by the landscape architect Warren Manning in his National Plan for the United States, shown below (Landscape Architecture, July 1923). Manning anticipated the growth of the industrial east and selected Monroe County as having qualities that should be protected as a focus for outdoor recreation. Today, the biologic quality of Monroe County is recognized not only by the County itself, but by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Region III of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region III (EPA), the Habitat/Biodiversity Research Program of the EPA in Corvallis, Oregon, and The Nature Conservancy. Reports produced by these groups were incorporated in the studio's research and evaluations. In a preliminary evaluation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified Monroe County as an area of high biodiversity within the Middle Atlantic Region of the United States. Biodiversity is defined by the EPA as "the variety and variability among living organisms and the ecological complexes in which they occur." Special studies are being conducted by the EPA Environmental Research Laboratory at Corvallis, Oregon, to address the risks to biological diversity in Monroe County. These studies of biodiversity will be used as a prototype for national scale biodiversity analysis. One current
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strategy to keep plants and animals off the "Endangered Species List" is to preserve areas of existing species richness (i.e. areas of high biodiversity) as a part of landscape planning, rather than continue to engage in crisis management after a species has been identified as threatened. Not only is this approach more appropriate from an environmental point of view, it will be more cost effective in the long run. The 'Total Species Diversity' map shows the summary biodiversity map for Monroe County. The estimates of species richness used to create this map were derived from interpreted satellite data of ground cover and habitat capability. This interpretive process can be explained as follows: Each unique ground cover (for example pine trees, maple trees, corn fields, urban areas, etc.) has a unique electro-magnetic "signature." This signature is comprised of a combination of two kinds of energy: 1) heat emitted from the earth, and 2) light from the sun reflected off the surface of the planet back into space. Orbiting satellites record the relative quantities of emitted and reflected energy from the earth and then transmit the data to research teams all over the world. The researchers then interpret the signatures based on actual field observations. Satellite interpretation for this study was conducted by Cornell University, under agreement with EPA Region III. Each ground cover type is then associated with a list of animal species for which it can provide habitat. The quantitative richness, or total number of possible species, then defines the biodiversity of the area of cover. The dark purple color on Figure 18 represents areas of highest biodiversity; yellow represents areas with the lowest biodiversity. |
