Resources
LCCs have produced a wealth of informational documents, reports, fact sheets, webinars and more to help support resource managers in designing and delivering conservation at landscape scales.
Spring has come to the Rockies and with it some recent meetings of collaboratives that are moving landscape conservation forward in the region. In this installment of the Great Northern LLC Rocky Mountain Partner Forum newsletter we have updates on some recent collaborative meetings and the work they are planning for the future.
The Rocky Mountain Partner forum is one of four Partner Forums located in the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) geography. The GNLCC brings together managers and stakeholders from around this vast, 300 million-acre landscape to share information and work on mutual priorities. More information about the GNLCC can be found here.
While winter is nearing its end, conservation efforts of our partners across the Rocky Mountain landscape of the Great Northern LCC are pushing forward. With major shifts in national policy, our local efforts are more important than ever.
We wanted to notify the Rocky Mountain Partner Forum members that a revision has been made to this report. Please reference this version going forward.
As a reminder, this report was a collaborative effort by the Wildlife Conservation Society, EcoAdapt, and The Center for Large Landscape Conservation. Authors Regan Nelson, Molly Cross, Lara Hansen and Gary Tabor worked with U.S. Forest Service managers at the Custer Gallatin National Forest to tailor the framework for decisions about native salmonid conservation.
As always, a variety of excellent work is being carried out across the Rocky Mountain landscape and we want to highlight some upcoming events, current projects, and relevant resources for Rocky Mountain Partner Forum members.
Columbia Plateau Phase 2 Focal Species Layer Packs (ESRI GIS Layerfiles) v10.1
Frequently Asked Questions About Climate Projections - Amy Daniels
Planning for Connectivity on National Forests Under 2012 Planning Rule
The Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) addresses landscape scale stressors across a large area of the northwest US and the Canadian west. The GNLCC supports several Partner Forums that span unique geographic sub-regions of the GNLCC (http://greatnorthernlcc.org/partner-forums).
Information from the CBPF Fall 2015 Meeting
If you manage to haul a frozen, skinned beaver carcass up a remote mountain pass in the middle of winter, then nail it about two metres up a tree, you might just be lucky enough to attract a wolverine.
That’s what researchers have been trying to do for the past few years as part of a multi-year study to learn more about these elusive predators, and how they move and survive throughout the mountainous terrain of southern Alberta and British Columbia.
This project builds from a body of work to support conservation planning and design for the Arid Lands Initiative (ALI) in the Columbia Plateau ecoregion. Previous work identified a suite of habitats and species along with their associated viability and stressors, as well as a portfolio of Priority Core Areas (PCAs) and high priority connectivity corridors. This previous work represents a design that, if realized, would improve protection of the current distributions of species, habitats, and connectivity corridors.
Cascadia is home to many sockeye salmon, including major runs that pass through the Columbia and Fraser basins. The largest stock in the world famously runs through these ecosystems by way of the Adams River and through the Fraser River system. Sockeye salmon in the both the Fraser and Columbia basins have declined substantially from historic levels when runs were as large as 3 million fish in the Columbia and 40 million in the Fraser at the turn of the 20th century. Reasons for these declines are diverse and sometimes speculative.
Untouched area. Mule Deer winter range and Grizzly bear habitat.
If the youth leaders of tomorrow's conservation movement could tell natural resource practitioners, wildlife and wildlands agencies, and non-profit organizations one thing, what would it be? To kick off the 2015 annual meeting of the Cascadia Partner Forum known we decided to find out as part of our Voices of Cascadia project.
Formed by practitioners in Washington and British Columbia’s Cascade mountains in the summer of 2012, the Cascadia Partner Forum fosters a network of natural resource practitioners working with the Great Northern and North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperatives to build the adaptive capacity of the landscape and species living within it.
Understanding a species’ behavioral response to rapid environmental change is an ongoing challenge in modern conservation. Anthropogenic landscape modification, or “human footprint,” is well documented as a central cause of large mammal decline and range contractions where the proximal mechanisms of decline are often contentious. Direct mortality is an obvious cause; alternatively, human‐modified landscapes perceived as unsuitable by some species may contribute to shifts in space use through preferential habitat selection.
Grizzly Habitat
Connecting with Kettle population
Largest untouched mule deer winter range in our territory.
Cross-jurisdictional analysis area from the Canadian Okanagan Valley south to Yakama Basin for wildlife habitat analysis for Cascadia Partner Forum.
2012 BC Grizzly Bear Planning Units. These are boundaries identifying similar behavioural ecotypes and sub-populations of Grizzly bears
Across Washington/ Idaho border
Hall Mountain Big horn Sheep Collar data
North-South Movement
Largest untouched mule deer winter range in our territory.
North-South Movement
This GIS dataset is part of a suite of wildlife habitat connectivity data produced by the Washington Wildlife Habitat Connectivity Working Group (WHCWG). The WHCWG is a voluntary public-private partnership between state and federal agencies, universities, tribes, and non-governmental organizations.
The Washington-British Columbia Transboundary Climate-Connectivity Project engaged science-practice partnerships to identify potential climate impacts on wildlife habitat connectivity in the transboundary region of Washington and British Columbia, and adaptation actions for addressing these impacts. This gallery includes data gathered or created as part of this project, as well as accompanying reports describing key findings for 13 case studies (including 11 species, a vegetation system, and a region).
Hwy 6 Crossings East of Kelowna
Description: With their project, Building Cross Cultural Capacity in the Crown of the Continent, Kimberly Paul and Laura Caplins are working to increase the “cross cultural capacity” of indigenous and non-indigenous groups to collaborate on climate adaptation in the Crown of the Continent. In order to achieve this purpose, the objectives of this project are to identify
The Okanagan-Kettle subregion straddles the Canada–USA border between the Cascade Range on the west and the Monashee Mountains and Kettle Range to the east. It has been identified as a key area for maintenance and restoration of north–south and east–west wildlife habitat connectivity.
The great thaw, As temperatures rise, many American glaciers could vanish in a few decades
We will develop an approach to identify fire refugia in Rocky Mountain ecosystems of the U.S. and Canada then test the function of refugia for biodiversity conservation under current and future climate/fire scenarios. Our products will be designed to inform decision-making in land/easement acquisition, identification of critical areas for maintaining landscape and process connectivity/permeability, and extension of the temporal context for spatial conservation decision making. The approach will be testable for transferability to other locations and ecosystems.
This database includes fire perimeter polygons for fires which reached a size >= 385 ha, and burned between the years of 1984-2011. Each fire has a unique numeric identifier of "PolyID". Additional attributes are as follows:
FIRE_ID: For those fires with an ID, the ID assigned by the reporting agency of the MTBS project.
FIRENAME: Names of those fires which are named. This is uncommon in Canada.
YEAR: The year the fire burned.
MONTH: The month the fire burned. If no month data is available the field includes a 0.
Shapefile of a set of fires sampled from the GNLCC Large Fire Database, 1984-2011. This sampled was collected from across the total variability in climate within the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) study area. Additional detail about the topography, climate, and burn severity was collected for this identified sample, and used to model fire refugia and low-severity burn probability within the fire perimeters.
The transboundary region of Washington and British Columbia (Fig. 1) is important for the conservation of many wildlife species. Some species of conservation concern, such as wolverine (Gulo gulo) and Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), have home ranges that span the international border. Other species depend on the region for seasonal habitat. All regional wildlife species will require a connected network of habitats spanning the border as they adjust their ranges to meet life history requirements under future changes to climate and land-use.
Presenter: Sandra L. Haire, Ph.D. As a landscape ecologist, Sandra is primarily interested in understanding how disturbance creates spatial patterns and affects ecological processes. Her research topics include the influence of management, climate, and topography on fire regimes, and identification of characteristic spatial and temporal scales of post-fire succession and forest regeneration.
This layer represents fires from 1985 to 2010 in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem. This layer is not a complete representation of all fires. It is a compilation from multiple sources.