Georgia Rare Species and Natural Community Information

Rare Species Locations

Disclaimer for use of Rare Species Location Data

Please keep in mind the limitations of our database. The data collected by the Nongame Conservation Section comes from a variety of sources, including museum and herbarium records, literature, and reports from individuals and organizations, as well as field surveys by our staff biologists. In most cases the information is not the result of a recent on-site survey by our staff. Many areas of Georgia have never been surveyed thoroughly.

The Nongame Conservation Section can only occasionally provide definitive information on the presence or absence of rare species in a given area. Our files are updated constantly as new information is received. Thus, information provided by our program represents the existing data in our files on the date indicated on these pages and should not be considered a final statement on the species or area under consideration.

Current Available Data

At the current time, known rare species and natural community EOs (element occurrences) are available generalized to the county and quarter quad level as Excel 2000, XLS files and an ESRI GIS shapefile. These files can be opened in any modern spreadsheet or GIS program. They can then be sorted, filtered and linked to do  analysis or generate reports. We plan to reimpliment the web page format for rare species locations in the near future.

Notes July 2010:
  • There are now draft web page versions of EOs by county listed at the bottom of this page.
  • Several people have noticed that rare species that previously were reported for certain quarter quads or counties are no longer reported for these areas in our currently provided data. This has been found to be due to several reasons (including misidentified specimens), but the primary reason has turned out to be that many newer more precise species occurrence boundaries in our database tend to describe smaller areas that intersect fewer counties, quarter quads or HUC watersheds than were previously intersected.

If you need to use the XLS data tables in ArcView 3.x you will need to convert them to DBF format. This is done by first opening them in your spreadsheet and then "Saving As" dBase IV (*.dbf) format.

Quarter quad data information is at the precision of one quarter (1/4) of a USGS 7.5 minute quadrangle map. Quarter quads are named using the USGS map name with a suffix (NW, SW, NE, SE).

Here are several sites where one may determine the name of a quad: U. S. Geological Survey Water Resources Division,  Georgia District, Map Mart, or USGS Map Finder.

The rare plant, animal and natural community EOs (element occurences) in Excel format are available for download in three formats (dates are when data was exported from our conservation databases):

Attribute columns for data in spreadsheets
  • SNAME: Scientific Scientific Name
  • SCOMNAME: Common Name
  • USESA: Federal protection under the Endangered Species Act
  • SPROT: Protection status in Georgia
  • GRANK: Global Rarity Rank
  • SRANK: State Rarity Rank
  • SSHABITAT: Brief habitat descritpion for speices in Georgia
Contact information

Contact information for our staff can be found in the NatureServe Network Staff Directory.

Metadata

Data was proscessed from original EO representations in Biotics Conservation Database using ArcGIS Model Builder with the Intersect, Spatial Join and Dissolve tools. Attribute tables were converted from the DBF file in the shapefiles to XLS format using Excel 2000. Provided shapefiles are projected to NAD83 UTM Zone 17N.

Detailed information about Natural Heritage data and methodology can be found on the NatureServe site starting at:
http://www.natureserve.org/explorer/aboutd.htm and http://www.natureserve.org/prodServices/biotics/biotics-learn-more.shtml

Formal metadata for Natural Heritage Network (NatureServe) element occurrence data is located at:
http://www.natureserve.org/prodServices/biotics/HDMSDoc/hdms_dx/NatureServe_EO_Metadata_09-2004.html

Rare elements by Georgia County (DRAFT)

To access web county rare element reports from the following drop-down box, please allow pop-ups in your browser for this page.

 



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