Prioritizing Areas of the Conasauga River Sub-basin in Georgia and Tennessee for Preservation and Restoration

Land preservation and restoration are important tools for managing imperiled aquatic species, but they are often applied in the absence of a transparent scheme of geographic prioritization. To help guide preservation and restoration efforts in the Conasauga River Basin in Georgia and Tennessee, we used the “Zonation” algorithm to prioritize sub-watersheds. Zonation is a prioritization system that uses species occurrence to identify localities of highest biodiversity, greatest interconnectivity, and (optionally) lowest cost. We based the prioritization on known and predicted distributions of 10 imperiled fish species and 12 imperiled invertebrate species, with predicted distributions derived from maximum entropy niche modeling. In the resulting prioritization scheme, highly ranked areas included the Conasauga River mainstem, the Conasauga headwaters, and the Holly Creek tributary system. We propose that a prioritization such as this should be conducted prior to any major program of land preservation or restoration.