ITHACA, N.Y. -- Most of New York state's vertebrates, from amphibians and reptiles to birds and mammals, have less than 10 percent of their predicted population on state- and federal-protected lands, according to an eight-year study conducted by Cornell University's Department of Natural Resources.

"That was a surprise," said Charles Smith, Cornell senior research associate in natural resources, who leads the New York state Gap Analysis Program (GAP), a federally funded, long-term effort to inventory land and water species. New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and the Cornell Institute for Resource Information Systems contributed to the report. "This tells me that our state agencies have an important management mission ahead of them, and we've got to enlist the public to help. We have to ask ourselves, how do we keep these animals around for future generations to enjoy?"

GAP is a national effort for the systematic inventorying and plotting of the distributions of plant communities and animal species in the United States, under the direction of U.S. Geological Survey. New York, after Maine, is the second state in the Northeast to complete the survey.

The Cornell naturalists mapped the predicted geographic distributions of 358 native, terrestrial vertebrate species throughout New York on protected and unprotected lands. Throughout the state, nearly all shrub lands and grasslands are privately owned. Because many rare or declining species are found in these habitats, many wild vertebrates appear to be poorly protected, according to Smith. Only about 15 percent of New York state consists of public land, which conceivably could be managed to protect the state's biological diversity.

"More than 200 years of intensive land use by humans, beginning with the first waves of European settlers, have created a complex landscape mosaic across the state," he says. "Because of the relatively small proportion of New York state which is public land, private land owners have the potential to contribute significantly to conservation of bio-diversity in our area, and educating the public about what we have is a very important part of conservation," Smith says.The report also found that a substantial variety of terrestrial vertebrates live along the Hudson River corridor, between Albany and New York City. Even though the Hudson Valley has only 13.5 percent of the state's land area and only 12 percent of that area is public land, about 83 percent of vertebrate species in the state can be found in the region.

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