Knowledge Center

Speakers will discuss legislative and regulatory matters that impact large landscape conservation with a focus on wildlife corridors and ​connectivity. This will include legal protections on:

• Federal and public lands, focusing on current regulatory tools and statutes that would give the US Forest Service authority to engage in habitat connectivity planning and a discussion of the potential protections via a federal Wildlife Corridor bill.
• A brief summary of recent State legislative successes.
• Tribal Lands, focusing on the Tribal Wildlife Corridor Act and other legislative priorities for Tribes to support large landscape conservation and habitat connectivity.

Presenters:
Susan Holmes, Federal Policy Director,
Wildlands Network

Erin Sito, U.S. Public Policy Associate,
Wildlands Network

Julie Thorstenson, Executive Director,
Native American Fish & Wildlife Society

Presenters:

• Hilary Morris, Blueprint User Support & Communications, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
• Mallory Martin, SECAS Coordinator, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (Unable to Attend)
• Shawn Johnson, Managing Director, Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy: University of Montana (Network Co-Chair)

This webinar will describe the evolution, implementation, and future direction of the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS), a collaborative landscape partnership focused on designing and achieving a connected network of lands and waters to sustain thriving fish and wildlife populations and improve quality of life for people in light of rapid changes in the Southeast, including urbanization and climate change.

The Southeast Conservation Blueprint is the primary product of SECAS and provides a collaboratively developed approach, involving diverse stakeholders and partners, to prioritize and focus conservation actions strategically on the landscape, incorporating key concepts of connectivity, buffering, and linkage to promote biodiversity and sustain the integrity of ecosystems and the services they provide (e.g., clean air, abundant clean water, natural areas for recreation and enjoyment, etc.).

SECAS provides value to its partners as a regional forum for collaboration and as a science and information hub throughout 15 states and portions of the Caribbean to inform conservation decisions across jurisdictions.

Presenter: Juan Carlos Bravo, Mexico Program Director, Wildlands Network

This webinar will introduce the challenges and opportunities of land protection in Mexico to address the obstacles of connectivity at a regional scale. Juan Carlos Bravo will present how the Wildlands Network addresses these obstacles by focusing on the jaguar, a species that inspires cooperation and brings together stakeholders from Mexico and the United States. By engaging a diversity of stakeholders across jurisdictional boundaries, the Wildlands Network will share how they fill gaps in knowledge through collaborative field research and combat the challenges of connectivity to conserve the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands.

Presenter: Breece Robertson, Director of Partnerships and Strategy, Center for Geospatial Solutions, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

Protecting special places in danger of being changed forever requires urgent action. It’s time for bold conservation strategies to boost land protection around the world. Bold conservation goals require strategic action.

In this presentation, conservationist and geospatial designer Breece Robertson will discuss the vision, strategies, and resources laid out in her new book Protecting the Places We Love: Conservation Strategies for Entrusted Lands and Parks. The goals of these strategies are familiar: support species, habitats, and natural resources and healthy, livable communities that are climate resilient and socially cohesive, all without high costs. To achieve this vision Robertson shares how to:

• create maps that tell compelling stories to stakeholders and the public
• analyze park system equity and access and show the economic benefits
• map, model, and analyze land characteristics to enhance biodiversity, connectivity, and climate resilience
• use maps and data to gain insights for fundraising, program initiatives, policy, advocacy, finances, and marketing.

Robertson offers a vision for success and clear guidance for conservation groups large and small to achieve their goals. With smart analysis and targeted action, our community can identify places needing protection and better understand how to maximize partnerships, inspire, educate, and engage communities and donors, and produce better results.

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Presenters:

• Page Buono, Coordinator, San Juan Chama Watershed Partnership
• Mary Stuever, Chama District Forester, New Mexico State Forestry Division
• Caleb Stotts, Executive Director, Chama Peak Land Alliance

Successful landscape-level restoration and stewardship require a process for strategically targeting treatments to the highest-impact portions of the landscape. This challenge is particularly acute at the landscape level because landscapes almost always span jurisdictional boundaries and contain numerous partners implementing restoration and stewardship efforts. How can you efficiently prioritize across boundaries, and how can you systematically track projects across a range of partners?

In the Rio Chama Watershed along the Continental Divide in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, the San Juan-Chama Watershed Partnership set out to limit random acts of restoration and further align partner efforts by designing a process for identifying focal areas within their landscape and cataloging projects within those focal areas. Developed in alignment with the New Mexico State Forest Action Plan, the simple, intuitive framework identifies and tracks progress in focal areas. This framework has been celebrated at the State level and adopted by additional collaboratives across the State. During this webinar, the San Juan-Chama Watershed Partnership coordinators will explain their focal area framework and highlight how they’ve rolled it out with their partnership. They will discuss how their work has rippled beyond their landscape to inform how other partnerships prioritize and track progress on restoration at the landscape scale.

Presenters:

• Danielle Denk, National Green Schoolyards Initiative Lead
• Linda Hwang, Director of Strategy and Innovation
• Robert Kent, Texas State Director
• Michael Giammusso, National Lands Initiative Lead

A comprehensive approach to landscape conservation must include urban spaces and communities, as much as it includes large wild places and rural communities. For nearly fifty years, The Trust for Public Land has been a leader in land protection and park creation, working with communities across the American landscape to advance equity, health, and climate resilience. Leaders from TPL’s parks and schoolyards teams will share insights on effective strategies for using park creation, spatial analysis, and community engagement as part of a conservation approach that strengthens and improves the livability of our cities while connecting them to a larger surrounding landscape that spans regional and, ultimately, national borders.

Presenter: Catherine Doyle-Capitman, National-Level Social Scientist, USDA Forest Service

Natural resource practitioners are increasingly taking a collaborative, landscape-level approach to natural resource conservation. Despite its potential advantages, this approach faces challenges. Primary among these is ensuring ecosystem-wide goals for conservation can effectively inform local management plans and actions. This necessitates working with local stakeholders. Opportunities for local stakeholders to participate in landscape conservation planning are often limited, in part because conservation leaders are uncertain about whether, when, and how these stakeholders might most effectively participate in decision processes.

In this presentation, Catherine Doyle-Capitman will provide an overview of best practices for engaging local stakeholders and incorporating social data during collaborative landscape conservation planning. An overview of these best practices can be found in the following practitioners’ guide: Facilitating Local Stakeholder Participation in Collaborative Landscape Conservation Planning.

Presenter: Paul Beier, Conservation Research Fellow, Center for Large Landscape Conservation

Drawing upon his more-than-thirty-year career designing and conserving wildlife corridors, Paul Beier, a Conservation Research Fellow with the Center for Large Landscape Conservation and formerly the Regents Professor of Conservation Biology at Northern Arizona University, will share insights into translating connectivity research into conservation action:

During a study of cougars in rapidly urbanizing southern California (1988-1992), I documented that dispersing cubs could find and use narrow corridors through urban areas, and my population model showed the importance of connectivity. Since then, I have been learning how to translate this science into conservation action. The key lessons were that fighting fragmentation is less effective than implementing a linkage design (duh!), and that scientists can be effective leaders only if we get local conservation practitioners to invite us to participate in their real-world work. This work involves workshops to identify 10 to 20 focal species per linkage, identifying barriers and chokepoints, and writing (nay, implementing!) plans that integrate the goals of conservation, economic development, and social justice. These efforts are not just slowing down the rate at which things get worse (“mitigation”), but are creating landscapes more permeable to wildlife than what we have today.

*Apologies that this recording is missing the first three minutes of the presentation. Please be in touch with Esther Duke at [email protected] with questions or to reach out about Lighthawk services.

Presenters:
Ryan Boggs, Chief Program Officer, LightHawk
Esther Duke, Western Program Officer, LightHawk

Founded in 1979, the conservation nonprofit LightHawk is the largest environmental flying organization in the country. We engage our network of more than 300 volunteer pilots to provide hundreds of flights each year. Working with more than 100 conservation partners, we help solve pressing river, ocean, land and wildlife problems.

LightHawk is donating flights to advance the work of Network for Landscape Conservation’s members. LightHawk flights can advance your conservation mission in many ways. Flying is often the best way to demonstrate the scope and potential impact of your initiative to:

· Legislators and policy-makers
· Key corporate partners and other stakeholders
· Foundation program officers and major donors
· Journalists and other media

Flights can also enable you to survey wildlife, monitor conservation easements, photograph your landscape, and even transport wildlife to support species recovery efforts. LightHawk provides customized conservation flight planning, planes, pilots, and advice on photography. Flights are available in Canada and Mexico as well as the U.S.

Presenter: Jodi Hilty, President and Chief Scientist of Y2Y

Founded in 1993, the Yellowstone-to-Yukon vision was one of the earliest large landscape conservation visions — an interconnected system of wildlands stretching from Yellowstone to Yukon, harmonizing the needs of people with nature. Many have suggested that they are inspired by this ambitious vision, but wondered whether the vision has had any real impact given that conservation advances are generally more localized.

The Network for Landscape Conservation was pleased to host award-winning author and veteran New Yorker contributor Tony Hiss for a conversation about his latest and just-published book, “Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth.” Tony was joined in the discussion as well by Valerie Courtois, Director of Canada’s Indigenous Leadership Initiative, whose work is featured in the book, and Brenda Barrett, editor and founder of the Living Landscape Observer and member the Network’s Coordinating Committee.

We are also pleased to partner with the Country Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in Bozeman, MT to make signed copies of Tony’s book available.