SMSC Land Department

Description
Species Profiles

Atlas projects for plants and other wildlife are common and the benefits are numerous. Atlas projects are a snapshot of an organism’s presence at a point in time. Complete another Atlas project a dozen years later, and one has another snapshot for comparison. Continue on the same track five or six times, and we have a very extensive database that identifies trends where one may track changes in distribution through time. Wildlife face many threats. Atlases allow scientists to evaluate the response of wildlife to impacts such as global climate change, development pressures on the breeding and wintering grounds, natural vegetative succession, the value of conservation programs, influence of disease, and on and on.

The Atlas project for the SMSC began in 2000. It started out to as a Breeding Bird Atlas but workers incorporated reptile, amphibian, and mammal survey data because we used the same sample units and it was easy to integrate the data into a Faunal Atlas. Many U.S. Atlases use townships (36 square miles) as the grids and quarter townships (9 square miles, 5,760 acres) as the sample units but that is not feasible with SMSC’s relatively small land base. We considered reducing the size of the sample units. This would require some alterations to the methods but overall the Atlas sampling scheme worked well for SMSC lands. We used the same township and range system but reduced the grids to quarter sections (160 acres) and the sample units to quarter-quarter sections (40-acres). This only required workers to adjust one probable breeding indicator where an observer witnesses seven or more signing males at a sample unit. Obviously seven males is quite a few birds to observe at a 40 acre sample unit compared with a nine square mile sample unit, and therefore, we reduced it to three or more observed males. For surveying reptiles, amphibian, and small mammals, we only had to figure out which sample unit we were in and incorporate the data. Medium and Large mammals were another story because their territorial range may be larger than 40 acres. We deduced that direct observation was enough to at least record their presence on the grid.

The Faunal Atlas of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community is expected to be complete in 2010 but work already completed is available (see [Species Profiles] tab).