Monday, 7 November 2005
25-3

This presentation is part of: Symposium---Twenty Years of Military Environmental Research

The Effects of Army Training on the Diversity of Threatened and Endangered Species.

Steven D. Warren, Reiner Büttner, Debra Dale, Nathaniel Whelan, and Scott Holbrook.

Military training lands are characterized by an unusually high density of threatened and endangered species. In the United States, the density of threatened and endangered species is 3 to 18 times greater on Department of Defense properties than on lands managed by other Federal land management agencies. In the German state of Bavaria, the Grafenwöhr and Hohenfels Training Areas support 2 to 3 times more threatened and endangered animal species per unit area than designated nature preservation areas, many of which lie in the Alps region which is known as a center of biodiversity in Europe. We hypothesize that the high density of threatened and endangered species on the training areas is due to the nature and non-uniform distribution of disturbances that occur there. We suggest that military disturbances replace, in part, natural disturbances that have been eliminated or reduced by well-intentioned land managers and public policy. The mosaic of disturbed and undisturbed habitats occurring on Army training lands provides a heterogeneous habitat capable of sustaining a greater number of species, many of which may be disturbance-dependent. To test the hypothesis, we evaluated the distribution of 8 threatened and endangered species (4 plants, 2 amphibians and 2 insects) in relation to maneuver disturbance at the Grafenwöhr and Hohenfels major training areas and the Freihölser Forst and Klosterforst local training areas. All 8 species exhibited varying degrees of dependence on maneuver disturbance; some required as much as 80-100% recent surface disturbance.

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