Promoting Ecological Connectivity
As human development fragments the Western landscape, efforts to improve ecological connectivity have rapidly gained momentum, building on years of research and strong relationships between local communities and state land management agency staff. Efforts to promote ecological connectivity and incorporate connectivity into land protection are key to creating a conservation network that supports biodiversity and protecting an ecologically functional 30% of America by 2030.
What is ecological connectivity?
Animals of all types need to move to complete their life cycles, migrate between seasons, and find resources and mates. Ecological connectivity is a measure of how well habitat is linked together to support wildlife movement and natural ecosystem processes. Biodiversity thrives when wildlife and plants are able to move: ecosystems have improved seed dispersal, plant communities rebound better following events like wildfires, and wildlife populations have better genetic diversity.
Habitat connectivity and wildlife movement occurs across many spatial and temporal scales, from a turtle or bear crossing a single road to salmon or herds of mule deer traversing hundreds of miles. In the West, big game migration often takes center stage in connectivity discussions. While measures to protect big game migration improve connectivity for other species and are key to supporting local communities and economies, there is also a need to expand connectivity discussions and efforts in the West to include a wider range of species.
Ecological connectivity can not only be promoted by protection of critical movement corridors and key habitat, but also by measures such as habitat restoration and improvement, the creation of infrastructure such as wildlife crossings and other solutions to allow wildlife to bypass roads and fences, and research to target future efforts and investments.
Waterways connect habitat for fish, but man-made barriers such as dams can prevent movement.
Why ecological connectivity?
Habitat loss and fragmentation are two of the greatest threats to biodiversity. Land protections are most effective when viewed through a landscape-scale connectivity lens, allowing for parcels to be efficiently and intentionally targeted for ecosystem functionality. With such an approach, land protections can address both threats to biodiversity in tandem.
Non-land-protection measures to promote wildlife movement, such as underlying research, wildlife crossings, and collaboration are also key to creating a functional network of protected areas. They help provide connective tissue between protected areas while integrating natural systems into our society.
In a connected landscape, biodiversity is also more resilient in the face of climate change. As animal and plant ranges shift in a changing climate, species and populations will need to be able to relocate.
Ecological connectivity supports healthy wildlife populations that are key to Western lifestyles, local communities, and recreation economies. Landowners and locally-based biologists are often the best informed about wildlife movements, making locally-led conservation efforts and collaboration essential to efforts to promote wildlife movement and migration.
Modeled wildlife movement patterns with continued climate change, by The Nature Conservancy.
What are states doing?
Designations
The most explicit way that Western states have established a commitment to promoting connectivity is via executive orders, legislation, resolutions, and high-level administrative changes and guidance. All of these pathways have led to on-the-ground conservation and help protect biodiversity, provide insight into future opportunities, and create a more connected Western landscape. However, only Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon’s executive order results in any form of land protection, while other actions instead help coordinate and direct state agency priorities—in many cases driving just as significant benefits for biodiversity.
Wyoming’s 2020 executive order to protect mule deer and antelope migration creates a science-based process to identify and conserve migratory wildlife corridors. Wyoming has so far designated the Sublette, Baggs, and Platte Valley migration corridors and has identified two others for potential designation. Once a corridor has been designated, the EO directs state agencies to protect wildlife movement, minimize surface disturbance, maintain habitat, and work to avoid wildlife-vehicle collisions within the corridor. Following designation, locally-engaged working groups are created to provide recommendations on the corridor and options to promote connectivity, such as incentives for voluntary private land conservation. Private landowners are explicitly exempt from the requirements of the executive order, allowing them to voluntarily pursue conservation opportunities. A significant gap in this order is that it strictly applies to mule deer and antelope wildlife populations, leaving out other species.
As one of the first states in the country to designate migration corridors, Wyoming has struggled with a number of implementation setbacks, including pushback from local landowners and uncertainty regarding connectivity science. However, the state has been able to move forward by highlighting landowners’ actions as explicitly voluntary, developing close relationships with private landowners, and working to clearly communicate the complex science of migration to both lawmakers and the public. Wyoming’s work to protect wildlife migration corridors can serve as a case study for other states, allowing practitioners to examine lessons learned and improve upon past solutions.
Research and communication
Wildlife research is critical for identifying spatially explicit opportunities to protect wildlife movement and migration, such as high-use movement areas or key habitat areas like migration stopovers or bottlenecks.
Researchers release a collared mule deer.
All Western states have recently expanded efforts to map and define migration routes and other wildlife corridors through GPS collar studies. Agencies have taken key steps toward understanding and promoting ecological connectivity in their respective states by following up on this research through the creation of extensive state action plans, analyses, prioritizations, status reports, mapping projects, and management plans. This research and planning enables solutions to be implemented, and is at its most beneficial when used as an adaptive tool and integrated with other planning mechanisms.
Through making wildlife movement data publicly available and leveraging research to tell a compelling story, Western states can drive effective conservation of high-priority areas.
Wyoming has been a migration research and communications leader, energizing local communities and sportsmen and women while drawing national attention to migration corridors such as the Path of the Pronghorn and the Red Desert to Hoback mule deer migration. By highlighting the movements of mule deer, Wyoming revealed a particular land parcel that, if developed, would have nearly completely blocked a key migration bottleneck. As a result, the parcel was purchased and eventually donated to the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission to be turned into the Luke Lynch Wildlife Habitat Management Area.
The Luke Lynch Wildlife Habitat Management Area helps secure one of the country’s most critical mule deer migration routes.
Utah has also made impressive strides in connectivity communication, publishing an interactive map of ongoing research and monitoring projects and developing a tool called the Wildlife Tracker. The tool allows state agencies to visualize extensive datasets in a form that is readily understood, and as a result Utah has had great success in working with local city planners to protect movement corridors. In the City of Eagle, where rapid development may soon prevent wildlife migration, use of the Wildlife Tracker to communicate with local officials has driven changes in land use plans that may result in increased connectivity and identified the potential need for conservation easement funding.
Easements and acquisitions
Protecting and sustaining wildlife movement and migration is impossible without targeted land protections to maintain open space in core usage zones. All connectivity legislation and executive orders in the West explicitly do not apply to private landowners. Instead, Western states have pursued connectivity-targeted land protections through voluntary private conservation easements and land acquisition. Conservation easements provide win-wins for landowners and wildlife, providing financing options to rural landowners while preventing large properties from being subdivided and broken up by accompanying roads and fences.
Montana, Colorado, and Idaho have all extensively integrated conservation easement opportunities into state action plans for big game migration. In Idaho, implemented examples include easements and acquisitions to allow movement of bighorn sheep in the south-central part of the state as well as others to support implemented wildlife crossings.
Montana and Colorado have both taken an approach of integrating connectivity into prioritizations and assessments in pre-existing state conservation programs and funding sources. This approach successfully directs funding toward connectivity-oriented land protections, with both states investing heavily in conservation easements to protect habitat in key wildlife movement areas. Montana’s connectivity strategy directs Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks to explicitly incorporate wildlife movement and migration into habitat programs and funding, while Colorado’s Habitat Stamp and GOCO funds are allocated via processes that take into account wildlife movement corridors and connectivity. For example, the Colorado Wildlife Habitat Program (CWHP) is targeted at Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission 2020 funding priorities, which include both “big game winter range and migration corridors” and “landscape scale parcels and parcels that provide connectivity.”
In Nevada and Wyoming, easements and acquisitions have been pursued on a more project-by-project basis. In Nevada, for example, a collaborative effort has secured a conservation easement for over 2,000 acres of crucial winter habitat that serves as a major migration stop-over, while over 1,000 acres have been acquired by the state to protect either side of an implemented wildlife crossing. An example in Wyoming is the Munger Mountain Corridor partnership, which resulted in a 236-acre conservation easement that allows cow elk to migrate to calving grounds.
Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona all recognize conservation easements as tools in their state action plans for big game migration, but have not worked to integrate them as fully into connectivity planning.
Despite the incredible work already underway, no state in the West has developed a robust public-private voluntary incentive structure or easement program specifically for the purposes of promoting connectivity and wildlife movement, although both Colorado and Wyoming executive orders suggest incentivizing voluntary landowner cooperation. As a benefit of creating explicit wildlife corridor designations, Wyoming has a unique opportunity to lead and explore targeted incentives for voluntary landowner connectivity projects or conservation easements, potentially with a sliding scale based on property locations within designated corridors.
Regulations
Western states have been cautious in drafting connectivity-related regulations that impact private landowners. However, Colorado has led the way on integrating connectivity into regulations on extractive industries, effectively protecting a significant amount of habitat from surface disturbance.
Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission recently developed the most comprehensive oil and gas regulations to protect wildlife habitat and ecological connectivity in the West, which went into effect in early 2021. The new rules minimize impact on wildlife migration corridors and critical habitats and can serve as a model for regulations in other states. The regulations put an additional 5.5 million acres of key wildlife habitat areas off-limits for drilling and required developers to consult with Colorado Parks and Wildlife experts before receiving drilling permits on an additional 12.7 million acres of high-priority habitat.
View an interactive storymap about Colorado’s new oil and gas regulations and how they protect habitat.
Non-land-protection measures
The benefits of land protections are greatly enhanced by measures that create connective tissue and opportunities for wildlife movement across the wider landscape. The vast majority of work that Western states are doing to promote movement and migration is through non-land-protection measures such as planning and prioritizations to direct future efforts; interjurisdictional and interdisciplinary collaboration to coordinate solutions; habitat management; and implementation of infrastructure-related solutions such as wildlife crossings and wildlife-friendly fencing. Such efforts are often how states are most effectively promoting connectivity, and should be supported and reinforced by additional resources and funding moving forward.
Here is a very brief summary of incredible and extensive work being done by states across the West:
Legislative, executive, and high-level administrative actions: Many Western states have made commitments to connectivity via legislative, executive, and administrative actions that do not explicitly protect land. Colorado’s 2019 executive order on conserving big game corridors and winter range set the stage for state action on connectivity, while Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks formalized an agency-wide commitment to ecological connectivity via a comprehensive strategy to centralize connectivity work within the agency in 2020. New Mexico’s legislature passed the New Mexico Wildlife Corridors Act in 2019, which mandates the creation of a Wildlife Corridors Action Plan to identify existing human-caused barriers to movement and migration for all species. Utah legislators signaled support for the protection and restoration of wildlife corridors via a concurrent resolution in 2020. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has also created the Utah Wildlife Migration Initiative, accompanied by dedicated staff and annual funding of $750,000. Moving forward, such mandates and actions should be accompanied by dedicated funding, and would maximize ecological benefits by addressing connectivity for all wildlife species.
Coordination: Promoting ecological connectivity requires interjurisdictional and interdisciplinary solutions and collaboration between states, agencies, and tribes. Over the past decade, collaboration in many states has evolved from checking boxes required by agency policies to proactive discussions to benefit wildlife and local communities. A particular strength of many Western states is found in strong collaborations between state transportation departments and wildlife management agencies, manifesting in MOUs, collaborative summits, ongoing working groups, and on-the-ground projects. It is important for states to formalize collaboration, ensuring continued commitment to partnerships and projects.
Habitat management: All Western states perform extensive habitat management in order to provide resources for migrating wildlife and increase populations. Management techniques can include herbicide application to mitigate habitat degradation by noxious weeds, invasive species removal to prevent conversion of native habitat, or post-fire treatment to re-seed and rehabilitate important habitat like stopovers and winter range.
Infrastructure: Roads, fences, and human development are the most common barriers to wildlife movement, resulting in roadway collisions between motorists and large wildlife and an annual societal cost of more than $8 billion. However, research has found that wildlife crossing structures can reduce collisions by up to 97 percent. As a result, all Western states have begun extensive efforts to implement solutions like under and overpasses, wildlife culverts, and wildlife detection systems. States are most successful when they engage local communities early and often when exploring such solutions. While well-designed fences can improve road crossings, other fences are dangerous. Research in Utah and Colorado has shown every year one ungulate is tangled for every 2.5 miles of fence. States have been successful in working to remove or modify fencing on state lands or collaborating with landowners to facilitate improvements of private fences.
Learn about the barrier that I-80 forms across Wyoming, and how wildlife crossings can help
Takeaways
States can ensure that the 30x30 goal accomplishes the goal of protecting biodiversity by incorporating habitat connectivity into land protection efforts and using additional measures to connect a functional network of protected areas.
Creating land designations to promote connectivity can be a complicated task, especially in terms of clear communication with local stakeholders. Corridor designations in the West should be explicit about exempting private landowners from regulation while instead incentivizing voluntary conservation efforts. On the other hand, there is a very real opportunity to protect land from development and surface disturbance through regulations on extractive industries.
A key way to protect land for the purposes of ecological connectivity is via voluntary private conservation easements. Such efforts have been extremely successful, and have the potential to ensure that an ecologically functional 30% of America is protected. By incorporating connectivity into project assessments and prioritizations, states can better fund intentional and efficient conservation.
Land and habitat protections to promote connectivity are only one part of the puzzle: the vast majority of work to promote connectivity is done through research, coordination, infrastructure improvements, habitat management, and legislative or administrative actions to prioritize the needs of biodiversity. The benefits of such research and solutions can be multiplied through compelling storytelling, which helps engage and energize local communities to preserve habitat and wildlife movement.