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.
The bottom line, literally: “This Memorandum does not create any substantive or procedural right or benefit enforceable by law or equity, nor does it create any private right of action.”
Correct, as far as the public goes, but it should tell employees that they would be supported in (and not be punished for) making these kinds of efforts. And ideally it should discourage that employee’s supervisors from doing the opposite.
On the other hand, the 2012 Planning Rule language on connectivity does create such rights.
Thanks Jon. Are there any judicial opinions finding USFS failed to comply with any connectivity-related provisions of the 2012 planning rule?
I’m not sure there have been any court decisions on any provisions of the 2012 Planning Rule. There are few cases decided and their claims have so far been based on ESA or NEPA. The pending San Luis Valley case on the Rio Grande revision does include some issues related to connectivity.
https://forestpolicypub.com/2021/11/19/nfs-litigation-weekly-november-19-2021/
We did that with thousands of overlapping directives the end with prescribed landscape fire and no logging. Now we want to end recreation and hunting on both private and public lands?
Comrade: 35 cents of every dollar to government pays ever expanding commissar numbers working to whatever ends The Executive’s puppeteers desire. Interest on the ever expanding debt is more than the Defense budget. Homeland Security can’t provide that. Education cannot make that work. Labor is killing industry that provides jobs for Labor. Healthcare is any oxymoron.
Humpty Dumpty is now the reality of promises made by politicians. Congress is not capable of “…putting him together again.”
NO. NYET. NADA. NAY.
Almost all wild plants and animals spend their entire existences in subbasin watersheds barely or only slightly affected by human developments, if at all. Subbasin watersheds dominated or overcome by human developments should be ashamed of themselves and areas of their subbasins should be set aside to ensure familiarity, recognition, and the survival of their local and native ancestors. That’s one opinion.
I’m tempted to agree with your opinion (it sounds like Biden’s 30 x 30), but not the facts you seem to base it on. Could you give us a cite for the first sentence?
Hi Jon: Every once in a while we agree on something! Or almost agree, and this appears to be one of those times. But unfortunately, I can’t give a specific cite for the first sentence. It is based almost entirely on personal experience, observation, definition, and common sense.
A map will show that most named subbsasins — typically called creeks — in the US are hardly affected by human developments. Even seasonal streamside and ridgeline roads and trails and/or campsites aren’t that common in many “backcountry” locations, and often they are the only types of human development defining most named public subbassins, such as USFS, BLM, or NPS lands.
Some of the native literature refers to plants as “animals that can’t move.” Even so, it is easy and reasonable to assume that almost all wild plants spend their entire existence in a single subbasin. Wild animals are more of a definitional and demographic determination. Are we including insects and earthworms? Or limiting to vertebrates with high juvenile mortality, such as fish, reptiles, and some bird species. Most mammals, large fish, and surviving birds are exceptions, but form a relatively small percentage of the subbasin’s total animal population.
The “shame” remark was for all of the voters who live in cities and don’t maintain populations of native plant and animal communities within their urban boundaries. Forest Park in Portland is a good example of an exception to this concern.
I guess your point is that connectivity isn’t important. Actually, the amount of “developed” land isn’t as important to this question as where it is. In particular, it includes transportation corridors that fragment habitat and prevents animal movement at multiple scales. Human developments of all kinds also tend to be in locations that animals would normally want use, especially riparian corridors.
Also, the need for connectivity is most acute for many at-risk species where populations are becoming isolated. So yes, if you want to include cheatgrass in your numbers, I guess I agree with your statement.