Multi-state effort in the West to map wildlife corridors, habitat

WASHINGTON  — The pressure of energy development on public lands in the West is driving a regional effort to map habitat and track crucial wildlife corridors that traverse state boundaries.

"We see it as a need to get this information out there early," said Carmen Bailey, Utah's impact analysis coordinator for the state Division of Wildlife Resources, "and not after all the planning is done. By then, it is too late."

Federal and local land managers have tapped an initiative by the Western Governors' Association called CHAT — or the Western Wildlife Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool — to create a consistent and useful source of information for public policy makers and others as local and regional land use plans, such as energy development, are crafted.

The Bureau of Land Management announced it wants to make use of state and regional maps to better assist in identify wildlife corridors and critical habitat to inform its decisions.

Arizona, Montana and Washington, as example, have already developed state-specific information and data, and a regional-level data set is now available that covers several states in the southern great plains.  More states are expected to develop information in 2012, and a West-wide CHAT is expected to be available in 2013.

Bailey says Utah managers are knee-deep in the map crafting process and expect to be done in 2013.

It's a complicated and painstaking process, she said, because state planners are attempting to leap frog jurisdictional boundaries with an eye toward better implementation of up-front conservation strategies.

"This has been an amazing collaboration across the West — nothing like this has happened before," Bailey said. "We are very independent agencies, with different agendas, different processes. For us to work together on something like this is very difficult."

Bailey said just as ecosystems can greatly differ from one geographical spot to another, so do the wants and needs of individual state populations.

"Still, we need a common map that brings all this information together," she said. "That is quite the challenge."

A white paper on the initiative adopted by the WGA said the state data plans would be a non-regulatory tool that ideally keeps individual state conservation objectives in mind while at the same time promoting better coordination.