(swoosh)
- [Narrator] Texas will be affected if numerous rare plants
are added to the threatened or endangered list
by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Researchers with Tarleton State University
have determined specific areas of the state
that have existing populations,
or that could support these plants.
- From a planning perspective,
what it means
is if they're in an area
where they're gonna be disturbed by a project,
we have to go through a separate coordination process
with the Fish and Wildlife Service
before the project can be environmentally cleared
and go to construction.
So that adds time and energy and effort
to the planning process.
- We determined 17 species
that were considered as rare,
and which needs to be taken care of at this point.
So the need basically was to figure out
what are the potential distribution of these species
in the state of Texas.
- They go in and they basically take known locations
and habitat parameters
that are described from those known locations,
and they plug those into a GIS-based model.
And it predicts areas on the landscape
where you would expect to have similar habitat conditions.
- So basically what we have the output of the project
is we have distribution maps for all these species.
- And then they send a team of folks out
to go and actually look in these higher probability areas
and try to determine
if the plants are actually there, or if the communities
of plants that are found with them are there.
- Let's say if TexDOT has certain project,
and they can overlay the location of their project
above these maps, and they can see
whether any project will interfere
with distribution areas of these species.
- So we really wanted
to have a broad group of stakeholders involved,
so that these models would be useful to TexDOT,
but also useful to the regulatory agencies
for other purposes as well.
And so if there's things we could do with these models
to make them more useful, not just for our purposes,
but also for the other stakeholders,
then that was something
that we talked about potentially doing.
- [Narrator] For more information,
and to find the publications for this project,
please visit the TexDOT research library
at the link shown below.