| The United States Forest Service (USFS) 2012 Planning Rule includes a requirement to "provide for the diversity of plant and animal communities", with a specific provision to "maintain a viable population of each species of conservation concern (SCC) within the plan area." Implementing this important provision requires an understanding of both which species are of conservation concern and whether their distribution occurs within the planning area. While various conservation status assessment resources can help identify which species might be listed "of concern", information about the potential distribution of SCCs within USFS jurisdiction is challenging to acquire, is poorly standardized, and can often be highly subjective. Advances in methods of predictive species distribution modeling and recent developments in the spatially explicit environmental covariates required to apply this method now support a rigorous, standardized, and repeatable approach to evaluating the probability of at-risk species occurrence in the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems managed by the USFS. Here we describe a proposed national standard for predictive distribution modeling in management and regulatory contexts. We draw from examples relevant to designations of SCCs on USFS lands. We demonstrate how a nationally standardized approach to predicting at-risk species distributions can increase transparency, reduce conflict and uncertainty, and improve conservation outcomes. |