Western Governors making progress protecting habitat and linkage zones

I spent the last two days at the Western Governor’s Association (WGA) Wildlife Council (WGWC) meeting in Helena.  The meeting focused on progress toward implementing a resolution for improving wildlife connectivity and linkage zones across the western states.

Back in 2007, the WGA adopted a resolution encouraging states to protect wildlife linkage zones and crucial wildlife habitat in the west.  The meeting this week highlighted two key things:

• a draft white paper that provides crucial wildlife habitat and decision support system guidelines, and
• a new Decision Support System (DSS) developed by the state of Montana for protecting key habitat and corridors.  

The draft white paper defines crucial habitats as:

Places containing the resources, including food, water, cover, shelter and ‘important wildlife corridors,’ that contribute to survival and reproduction of aquatic and terrestrial wildlife and are necessary to prevent unacceptable declines, or facilitate future recovery of wildlife populations, or are important ecological systems with high biological diversity value.

It defines “important wildlife corridors” as:

A subset of crucial habitats that provide connectivity over different time scales (including seasonal or longer) among areas used by animal and plant species.  Wildlife corridors can exist within unfragmented landscapes or join naturally or artificially fragmented habitats, and serve to maintain or increase essential genetic and demographic connection of aquatic and terrestrial populations.

The draft white paper goes on to provide three categories of crucial habitat, but I was also pleased to hear council members state that they are considering adding a fourth category for restoration.

The Decision Support Systems are not regulatory tools, but instead are analysis tools that can be used well during the pre-planning or planning stage for site specific or regional projects that may affect habitat and linkage.  The wildlife council expects DSSs to be particularly useful for helping site energy development, transportation planning, and other land uses (e.g. residential or ex-urban development).

Some western states have previously developed DSSs for other wildlife/environmental issues, while others haven’t and are developing them as a way to implement the 2007 resolution.  For those states that do adopt a DSS, the committee is trying to identify opportunities to integrate those tools (perhaps by identifying some common GIS layers that every state would use in their tool) so that habitat and linkage issues can be assessed across state lines.  

The MT Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks (FWP) is still in the process of finalizing their tool, but they’ve made some significant progress and the tool may prove invaluable to conservation activists working on travel and land management planning.  MT FWP used both aquatic and terrestrial species, habitats and conditions to identify important wildlife habitats in the state.  

These DSSs (both those that exist and those that are in development) have the potential to be extremely valuable tools in transportation planning.  It is likely that in the west a lot of the crucial and important habitat will be on federal lands.  For any forests that have not yet released their MVUMs to designate ORV routes, it would be fascinating to see how the MVUM overlays with important aquatic and terrestrial habitat identified on a DSS.  It would be extremely useful to use that data to make comments about how the agency can minimize impacts to wildlife as part of the designation process.  Unfortunately, a lot of travel plans are in the final stages of completion, but that is not necessarily the case for the DSSs.

In addition, if the Forest Service does undertake a science-based analysis to identify their minimum road system, these DSSs have the potential to provide site-specific data that could help determine which aquatic and terrestrial core habitat and linkage zones might be most important to protect and restore from the impacts of roads.

We’ll be continuing to follow this issue and to post links to the DSSs as they become publicly available.