The West Virginia Gap Analysis Project is an ongoing collaborative effort of the West Virginia Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and the Natural Resource Analysis Center and WVU.  The study, which involves statewide land use/land cover mapping, wildlife habitat mapping, and mapping of all public lands in the state to document statewide biodiversity protection, is now in its final year of activity.  Significant progress has been realized in all aspects of the project.  For example, land stewardship (ownership and management) mapping, wildlife habitat model development, and species distribution mapping have been completed.  In addition, final habitat mapping for herptiles is complete and being circulated among experts in the state for final review.  During the last year we made significant improvements in our wetland/riparian modeling process for developing our amphibian and reptile habitat mapping.  We have also begun compiling verification data for use in assessing the accuracy of predicted wildlife distribution maps.  We have obtained species checklists for a number of areas that are relatively independent of the data used for estimating wildlife habitat extents.

Final vegetation alliance mapping is proceeding statewide using general ecological land association as our units of analysis and mapping.  Alliances are being grouped into ecological complexes for final mapping and use in implementing our wildlife habitat modeling.  We have also developed a West Virginia Gap Analysis home page, as a means of distributing our general methodology, documentation, and data.  The home page is also linked to a live Internet Map Server application that will allow mapping from the project database.  Products from the project have already been distributed to over a dozen Federal and state agencies.