Rapidly increasing environmental stressors and a chronic shortage of resources to monitor and mitigate them require natural resource conservation organizations like the BLM to set priorities for…

This $642,640.14 Cooperative Agreement award from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under the CFDA 15.247 Wildlife Resource Management program supports a project by Montana State University (MSU) to address the growing need for natural resource conservation and biodiversity monitoring. The project aims to develop improved methods for prioritizing conservation efforts, moving beyond the traditional use of focal or surrogate species approaches. MSU will conduct research to accurately identify important areas for maintaining functional habitats and implement objective, effective prioritization strategies. This work is intended to help the BLM and other natural resource agencies make more informed decisions about conservation investment and delivery. The award has a performance period from September 2024 to September 2028.

Rapidly increasing environmental stressors and a chronic shortage of resources to monitor and mitigate them require natural resource conservation organizations like the BLM to set priorities for investment. Area-based strategies dominate current processes for prioritizing conservation. This process depends on 1) accurately identifying important areas for maintaining functional habitats for biodiversity, and 2) objective and effective methods to prioritize areas for conservation delivery. Area-based planning for conservation has largely been guided using focal, surrogate, or umbrella species approaches rather than complete inventories of endemic species. For example, the BLM identifies 30 million acres as priority habitat management areas (phmas) based on their relative perceived value for sustaining sage-grouse, considered a surrogate species for sage-brush steppe ecosystems. In other cases, conservation planning for focal species is driven by legal obligations of land management agencies (e.g., secretarial order 3362). Critical evaluations of the surrogate or umbrella species approaches have demonstrated an ineffectiveness of the strategy for conserving biodiversity (all sources presented in project narrative).