Proceedings of the 63 rd Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute November 1 - 5, 2010 San Juan, Puerto Rico Integrated Gap Analysis Project: Assessing Conservation of Freshwater, Estuarine, Marine, and Terrestrial Biodiversity WILLIAM A. GOULD*, MARIANO SOLÓRZANO, MARTHA PATRICIA RINCÓN-DÍAZ, SUHEY ORTIZ-ROSA, MARIA ISABEL HERRERA-MONTES, and BENJAMIN J. CRAIN International Institute of Tropical Forestry (IITF), USDA-FS, 1201 Calle Ceiba, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00926-1119. *wgould@fs.fed.us. ABSTRACT The structure and function of freshwater, estuarine, and marine environments are affected by surrounding and upstream terrestrial ecosystems. Conservation areas often encompass both terrestrial and aquatic resources. Government policy makers and natural resource managers must often consider a complex landscape matrix and need accurate, fine-scale information on the distribution of species and habitats in order to develop conservation management plans. An integrated terrestrial and aquatic GAP analysis project is addressing this need. The goal is to develop a comprehensive set of databases on Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands’ freshwater and marine resources – including habitat description and mapping, species distributions and conservation status, and protected areas and conservation priorities – combined with existing Puerto Rico and USVI terrestrial GAP databases, to conduct integrated analyses of gaps in conservation protection. As a start to this project we have complied an annotated list of over 1200 animal species associated with terrestrial and aquatic habitats in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. We have modeled the distributions of over 200 of the terrestrial species and are working on 200 aquatic species and their habitat distributions. This will be used to develop species range maps and predicted distributions, which will then be assessed in terms of the degree to which species and habitats are protected for conservation by reserves and other protected areas. KEY WORDS: Marine Protected Areas, conservatioon, Biodiversity, GAP analysis Análisis Integrado del Proyecto Gap: Determinación de la Conservación de la Biodiversidad de las Ecosistemas Agua Dulce, Estuario, Marina, y Terrestre PALABRAS CLAVE: APMs, conservación, biodiversidad, análisis integrado Gap Analyse Intégré de Projet Gap: L'Evaluation de la Conservation de la Biodiversité des Écosystèmes d'Eau Douce, d'Estuaire, Marine, et Terrestre MOTS CLÉS: Conservation, biodiversité, analyse intégré Gap INTRODUCTION The GAP analysis program (Scott et al. 1993, Jennings 2000) was initiated in the early 1980s as a landscape approach to conservation planning with the following objectives: i) To map distributions of animal species and habitats, ii) To map conservation areas, and iii) To assess the relationships of animal and habitat distributions with respect to protected areas. The program was initiated as state-wide assessments and has progressed to regional and national scales over the last two decades. It is administered by the U.S. Geological Survey and is an open, collaborative program. The mission of the National Gap Analysis Program is to conduct regional assessments of the conservation status of native animal species and natural land cover types in order to determine ―gaps‖ in the conservation of species and habitats, and to assist in conservation planning and management. The Caribbean has been recently included with implementation of the Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands projects (Gould et al. 2007, Gould et al. 2010) which focused on terrestrial species and habitats, and this has been expanded with the initiation of the Integrated Terrestrial-Aquatic Gap Analysis Project (Integrated Gap) described here. The coastal zones are perhaps the earth’s most complex landscapes physiographically, ecologically and socially. They harbor biologically diverse reef, estuarine, and wetland systems, they exchange materials and energy with deep ocean and terrestrial systems, they are home to perhaps 60% of humanity (Sloan et al. 2007) and have always been a culturally important landscape. The