From:

Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Ecological Classification for Conservation
By The Nature Conservancy.

“Beyond the Conservancy”, Example 1:

Meeting Our Global Stewardship Responsibilities: Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba

In part because of restricted public access to many of its lands, the U.S. Department of Defense has become an important steward of many sites of significant biological value. The U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is no exception. Like many islands, Cuba has a high biological value because of the many species and communities that have evolved there and occur nowhere else. Within Cuba, the U.S. Naval Station is of especially high value. It encompasses a wide variety of coastal and dry tropical habitats and harbors several species of animals that appear to be abundant and thriving within the station’s confines, even as their populations elsewhere are in decline. To meet its obligations regarding management of natural resources, the Department of Defense recently funded a rapid ecological assessment (REA) of the station to take a quick, scientific “snapshot” of its biodiversity and inform a plan for managing its resources. USNVC alliances and associations were used to help create this snapshot. Aerial photographs and satellite imagery were used to target and supplement more time- and labor-intensive field surveys, and 25 associations were delineated at the station.

“Rapid” and “appears” both sound like operative terms here. When you’re working around the second largest minefield in the world, remote sensing is probably the way to go for ecological inventories.