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Contributed Talk

Session: : Conservation Management 3

COS 58-5 - CANCELLED - A co-production approach towards place-based conservation

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
9:00 AM – 9:15 AM PDT
Location: C120-121
Abstract: Place-based conservation often has to contend with balancing human activities and wildlife refuge on the land. For a multi-use mandated agency such as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), meeting the needs of threatened wildlife while still allowing for authorized human use which, at times, conflicts with wildlife interests, is paramount. To this end, Conservation Science Partners and BLM co-developed a novel set of guidelines for species recovery centered around the concept of ‘recovery focal areas’. We applied these guidelines to the management of the federally threatened Mojave desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii). The tortoise’s range extends across portions of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, and the BLM manages more than half of the Mojave desert tortoise’s designated critical habitat. We convened workshops and webinars with over 50 BLM staff from more than 20 field, district, and state offices within the tortoise range, as well as tortoise experts from US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), to define range-wide recovery focal areas, identify major threats within these areas, and prescribe recovery projects that can be implemented over a 5 - 10 year period. We also developed a prioritization scheme for the recovery focal areas and the prescribed projects, with considerations for sociopolitical, managerial, ecological and climatic feasibility. Finally, we identified public outreach communication programs and multi-year monitoring schemes to be implemented with each project. This case study offers BLM a roadmap for more effectively managing Mojave desert tortoise habitat, and can be extended to other threatened species that inhabit BLM land. Further, this collaborative, long-term framing for threatened species management will assist BLM in meeting the Department of Interior priority to conserve at least 30% of US lands and waters by the year 2030.