For State Wildlife Action Plans

Background

Originally drafted at the request of Congress to enable eligibility for funding through the State Wildlife Grants Program, Wildlife Action Plans were successfully completed by each of the wildlife management agencies in the 56 U.S. states and territories in 2005. Together, the 14 Northeast plans represent a highly detailed blueprint for wildlife conservation across the Northeast United States. Each plan identifies a set of species of greatest conservation need, priority wildlife habitats for conservation, threats and stressors, recommended conservation actions, partnership and outreach opportunities, and methods for monitoring and evaluation. Although each of the plans is based on a common set of elements, the individual state wildlife agencies were given considerable latitude by Congress and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to customize their plans to fit their particular conservation needs. While the ability to develop unique, customized plans provides some benefits to the states, one readily apparent drawback is the inherent difficulty of comparing across states. Such an analysis can help to identify major conservation issues that extend beyond state lines to larger landscape or regional scales.

Recognizing this need, NEAFWA held the first in a series of meetings in Albany, NY, to coordinate implementation of the plans on a regional level in 2006. As a result of that meeting, the Northeast states working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and Wildlife Management Institute (WMI) began pooling a portion (4%) of their State Wildlife Grant funds program allocation to develop a grant program that addresses regional conservation needs. This RCN grant program has since funded dozens of key regional tools including regional habitat classification and models (Gawler 2008, Olivero and Anderson 2008); built collaborative regional monitoring programs (NEAFWA 2008); sought to assess impacts of climate change on a regional level (Anderson 2011; Galbraith 2013); and contributed significant levels of funding every year towards regional conservation needs. This regional culture of cooperation has also enabled states to pool and leverage their individual resources for wildlife conservation to address issues of common interest to the entire region.

First Steps: Identifying Priority Species for Regional Conservation

This evolving priority-setting process and RSGCN list is built upon the concept of review and re-evaluation by the NEFWDTC in order to maintain a current list of species that are of regional conservation interest. The most recent effort began in 2011, when the regional taxonomic expert teams updated the RSGCN list, and those results are incorporated into this document along with additional data compilation efforts by NALCC for regional species prioritization.

Regional Planning and Prioritization Advanced by Cross-border Collaboration

The regional collaboration and conservation partnerships described in this document stem from a regional planning process initiated by the NEFWDTC that included the workshops described below and which led to regional priority setting and the RCN Grant Program to fund these priority needs. Informed by these regional priorities for species and habitat conservation states may work together or individually on priority actions.

2006 Regional Conservation Planning Workshop (Albany I)

In 2006, after the State Wildlife Action Plans had been completed, a workshop was held to work towards identifying regional conservation priorities. NEAFWA’s Fish and Wildlife Diversity Technical Committee, with funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, held a meeting in Albany, New York. Forty-five people attended the meeting, representing the NEAFWA, the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (AFWA), the USFWS, and all but one state in the region.

The meeting focused on identifying specific actions that reflected the collective priorities identified in the Wildlife Action Plans to further fish and wildlife conservation in the region. The process began with a list of 41 priority conservation actions developed by the NEFWDTC (then called the Northeast Endangered Species and Wildlife Diversity Committee), and an additional 31 priority actions were identified by states at the meeting. From this list of 72 priority actions, six regional priority needs were identified (see Figure 0.1):

1. Select regional land cover, stream, and habitat classification systems and create a regional geographic information system (GIS) platform, and then identify quality and critically imperiled habitat types and locations.

2. Identify the top 20 invasive species and related issues that negatively impact SGCN and develop implementation actions and monitoring protocols to gauge effectiveness of management actions.

3. Identify a system of Northeast conservation focus areas to support sustainable populations of SGCN.

4. Develop regional in-stream flow standards, guidelines, and policy standards that allow for management of the quantity and temperature of flows that mimic natural conditions and protect aquatic life from thermal stress and other flow-related threats.

5. Develop model guidelines for training local planning boards on how to incorporate Species of Greatest Conservation Need and their key habitats into local planning.

6. Develop regional indicators and measures (of SGCN, habitats, strategies, and Wildlife Action Plan effectiveness) to ensure successful conservation.

Northeast RCN grant program

One of the most important outcomes of the first Albany workshop was the creation of the RCN grant program to address conservation priorities identified at Albany I (Figure 0.1). Since 2007, the NEAFWA thirteen states and the District of Columbia have contributed 4% of their annual federal State Wildlife Grants (SWG) Program funding to support projects of regional conservation interest. This funding is offered through an annual request for proposals administered by the NEAFWA in collaboration with the WMI and USFWS. The funds are used to address conservation priorities that are shared across multiple jurisdictions.

Figure 0.1. Schematic of the Regional Priority Framework for Ordering Priority Activities from Albany I Workshop. Source: NEAFWA.

Funding priorities for the Northeast RCN Grant Program continue to evolve. Many of the initial priorities have been funded and are reported in this document. The program itself practices adaptive management, refining priorities and selecting topics for funding so as to respond to urgent emerging wildlife needs, while at the same time continuing to address longstanding regional conservation concerns and keeping common species common. Details about the specific funding priorities addressed during each RCN grant cycle are available at the RCN website, http://www.rcngrants.org.

Over the first 5 years, the RCN program put more than $1.8 million to work to address regional fish and wildlife management challenges and high-priority conservation initiatives. Partners matched these awards for total conservation funding of $3.6 million between 2007 and 2011. Many of the funded projects have produced results that were used as the foundation for successful grant proposals to implement recommendations or further study the species, habitat, or threat. (Figure 0.2)

Figure 0.2. 2007-2011 RCN Funded projects by topic area.

Moving forward, this grant program will continue to support innovative conservation approaches that address conservation priorities across the Northeast states. The RCN Grant Program thus represents a significant regional conservation collaboration success story and serves as a model for the nation (Meretsky et al. 2012), one that is expected to continue as long as financial support continues to be provided by the Northeast states. Funding is also available for regional collaboration through the competitive portion of the SWG Program administered by the USFWS.

2011 Regional Conservation Planning Workshop (Albany II)

The second Northeast Regional Conservation Planning Workshop was held in Albany, New York in 2011. Thirteen state agencies, six federal agencies and 12 non-profit organizations and universities were represented. The workshop was convened and sponsored jointly by the NEAFWA and the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC) of the USFWS.

Having already set regional priorities at the first meeting, participants at the second meeting recognized the need for an effective approach to implement and address these priorities. Therefore the second meeting focused on the development of a regional conservation framework to guide the regional effort as it moved forward. The foundation of this framework was the NEAFWA RCN priority topic areas (listed above and described in Figure 0.1) and the components of the USFWS’s Strategic Habitat Conservation approach (http://www.fws.gov/strategic-conservation/). The proposed framework included the following components: Priorities; Biological Assessment; Goal-Setting; Conservation Design; Science Translation Tools; Conservation Adoption; Conservation Delivery; Monitoring, Evaluation and Research; and Information Management (see Chapter 4 and Figure 0.2).

As in the 2006 workshop, priority needs were identified and ranked within the framework components under each element. Overall priorities reflected in these needs included an immediate focus on communications, dissemination, and adoption; the importance of developing an effective information management system; and an emphasis on expediting delivery of the right actions in the right places. (http://rcngrants.org/content/summary-report-northeast-regional-conservation-framework-workshop-2011-0). Subsequent products have reflected these priorities, including the development of the present document.

Figure 0.3. Northeast Conservation Framework, developed by the NALCC and the Northeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. Source: NALCC.

This common framework developed by the NALCC and the NEAFWA is very similar to the Strategic Habitat Conservation approach developed by the USFWS and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), but it places greater emphasis on the design, translation, and adoption of the science and tools, as well as on information management. Existing science, data, and translational tools can be organized so that managers can discriminate between what is available and what is still needed. The partners in the framework also developed a regional conservation lexicon providing a common terminology for discussing conservation projects and conservation priorities across the Northeast states.

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