Authors: Northrop, Robert;

Rapid urban expansion is contributing to the present biodiversity crisis. Urban planners and conservationists need tools to evaluate habitat impacts due to urbanization. To address this need a user friendly rapid habitat assessment tool was developed. It uses an integrated series of databases that link forest composition, vegetative development stage, forest and non – forest structure, and non-forest habitat features with maps of known vertebrate distribution. The habitat assessment tool was tested using presence/absence data for 29 commonly occurring herpetofauna collected by the State of Maryland USA over a two year period on seven sites within the Piedmont Plateau physiographic province. The assessment tool correctly predicted the presence of 97% of the herpetofauna. The overall omission error rate was 3%, suggest that the model is achieving improvements in accuracy over earlier wildlife habitat relationship models, a possible outcome of its narrow geographic focus and its focus on using local and regional habitat descriptions when available. The average commission error rate was 43%. A significant goodness of fit was found between the observed and predicted herpetofauna at the 7 inventory sites (χ20.05, 6df = 0.9, P>.975).