Oregon Connectivity Assessment and Mapping Project (OCAMP)
Help wildlife stay connected!
Many species rely on the ability to move throughout the landscape to fulfill their daily and seasonal needs for access to food, shelter, and opportunities to reproduce. Human changes to the landscape often restrict the ability of wildlife to move by adding barriers, inducing changes in their behavior, impacting critical migration stopover sites, and increasing habitat fragmentation. The Oregon Connectivity Assessment and Mapping Project (OCAMP) aims to link landscapes for wildlife by identifying habitat connectivity throughout the state for 54 of Oregon’s native wildlife species.
How You Can Help
In particular, there are ten species that have very few observations in the state, and we need your help to find out where they are:
- North American Porcupine
- Black-tailed Jackrabbit
- Ord’s Kangaroo Rat
- Northern Alligator Lizard
- Western Rattlesnake
- American Pika
- Bushy-tailed Woodrat
- Mountain Goat
- Long-nosed Leopard Lizard
- Northern Flying Squirrel
Observation data helps us identify where species are in the state, and where they’re moving! We’ll be using observations collected by iNaturalist users to validate our connectivity maps. The more observations we have for a given species, the more confident we can be that the maps we produce will be useful for species conservation. You can help us by sharing photos of any of the 54 OCAMP species. Exploring Oregon’s forests, meadows, and peaks to find where these species are is an important mission, and we can’t do it alone!
Comments
I have one observation of a Northern Alligator Lizard. 6/5/2020. Hayward, Oregon.
By "Northern Flying Squirrel" do you mean Glaucomys sabrinus or do you mean Humboldt's Flying Squirrel (Glaucomys oregonensis)? iNaturalist now distinguishes between these two.
@jayras Great question! We are interested in observations for both G. oregonensis and G. sabrinus. At this time, Humboldt's flying squirrel (G. oregonensis) isn't officially recognized by the state as a separate species. Given the recent taxonomic change, many of the existing observations we have available within the range of G. oregonensis were labeled G. sabrinus. Before we do any analysis of the data, we plan to split these observations on our end to account for this complication. In Oregon, the two species haven't been shown to occur in sympatry, so we can distinguish between them geographically.
@insectology Thanks for your contribution! It looks like you've added that observation to our project, which means it is available to OCAMP analyses.
Add a Comment