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Federal lands are separated by highways all over the west. Those highways are a barrier to many species of wildlife, including species listed under the Endangered Species Act and those identified as Species of Conservation Concern (SCC) in national forest planning. Climate change is recognized as increasing the importance of wildlife movements.
Forest Service planning regulations pertaining to designation of SCC require consideration of all threats to the species’ persistence in the plan area, whether or not the threats occur within the plan area or are the result of national forest management. Often, significant threats to these at-risk species come from outside of the federal lands; one of these is the effect of highways on connectivity. The Forest Service could improve prospects for some species to persist in the plan area by making it easier for them to get to and from it. They can do two things to promote that. They can 1) collaborate with other agencies managing land, wildlife and transportation to identify the most important areas to jointly manage for connectivity, and 2) manage their lands in or near these areas to minimize barriers to wildlife movement, first by recognizing them as such in forest plans.
There’s a new tool from the Center for Landscape Conservation that could help with identifying the important areas consistently across the west. As with any newly available science, the agencies involved should be looking at this mapping tool and determining whether and how they will use it, and ideally documenting the rationale, especially for disregarding this new information. National forests should be checking their forest plans to see whether their assigned management areas would make these connectivity areas less attractive to wildlife movement, and amending plans as needed.
The study that produced these maps also found that “1,523 of the CC (“collision and connectivity”) segments (338 mi) have enough collisions to make it more cost-effective to build a wildlife crossing than to do nothing,” and land management agencies should support such efforts and manage their lands to facilitate their use by wildlife.
