One of the hills I died on near the end of my Forest Service career was an attempt to get national forest planning to coordinate with future plans for adjacent ownerships to provide for wildlife habitat connectivity among them, including local government planning and land trust conservation easements. I thought the Forest Service could play a leadership role in coordinating this. The response I got was that anything to do with private lands was a “third rail” that they didn’t want to go near. This sounds different.
On October 21, a Department of Agriculture memo announced “a Department-wide effort to support connectivity of wildlife habitat on working landscapes through the management of National Forests and voluntary conservation assistance on private agricultural lands.” Specifically, a new Secretary’s Memorandum directs USDA agencies to:
- Incorporate consideration of terrestrial wildlife habitat connectivity and corridors into relevant planning processes, programs, and assessments.
- Improve the coordination, compatibility, and delivery of USDA planning processes and programs to improve outcomes for terrestrial wildlife connectivity.
- Increase inter-jurisdictional coordination with states, tribes and other federal departments.
- Coordinate within USDA to implement the actions outlined in this memo, with the goal of improved delivery of USDA programs and outcomes for terrestrial connectivity.
Needless to say, I like the recognition in the first bullet that planning, specifically recognized later to include “FS land management planning,” is important to a desired outcome that requires designing bridges connecting multiple owners; otherwise, the result may be bridges to nowhere or with missing spans.
The memo recognizes that “A recent revolution in animal tracking, remote sensing, and computational analysis is improving the prioritization of conservation and restoration actions.” It also notes, “The agency’s 2012 planning rule, which governs land management planning across these lands, included requirements for evaluating, maintaining, or restoring connectivity” (my contribution to posterity). The directive includes a specific proposal related to forest planning:
- Improving planning through Forest Service analytic tools, including a Climate Risk Viewer that identifies climate change-driven risks to key resources, such as corridors and connectivity, as well as migration corridor tool development among the National Forest System, Research Stations, and partners.
Because “Federal lands often serve as anchor points for wildlife, but most of the country’s wildlife reside on private lands,” much of the emphasis may be on supporting private land conservation. However, “this collaboration will build on the crucial connection between public lands and the private lands around them.” (Or at least to the extent that a Secretary’s memo can accomplish anything.)
Strict preservation of perceived corridors is doomed to fail, when those mortality-ridden pieces of ‘protected’ lands burn. Will those burned pieces be ‘replaced’, until no suitable replacements are available? We’ve seen examples of burned ‘protected’ lands not recovering, due to the human-caused re-burns that are so common, these days.
Dead and dying forests make poor ‘corridors’. However, Wilderness status will make some of those dead forests into low-value ‘corridors’. Since there is nothing else we can do about these issues, I guess we have to accept those problems as part of the package.
This kind of coordination seems more likely to involve front-country national forest lands, where vegetation management is less likely to be controversial and wildlife could be a joint priority for managing the national forest lands to reduce fire risks.
The bigger threat to most wildlife movement than forest cover is long-term human developments, and moreso on adjacent private lands than the limited development that may occur on most federal lands. But the federal land managers have an interest in what happens outside the green line because of how it may affect national forest resources. There may be locations on national forests where developments on the outside would threaten wildlife and/or fire risk, which the Forest Service should be discussing (and planning for) with adjacent jurisdictions.