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Unprecedented and widespread environmental and
human influences are shaping ecological conditions
across public lands.
The Issue……..
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• Wildfire
• Weeds and insect infestations
• Energy development
• Urban growth
• Climate change
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tIn 2010 BLM initiated a number of REAs
to improve the understanding of the
existing condition of these
landscapes, and how conditions may be
altered by ongoing environmental
changes and land use demands.
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• determine ecological values, conditions, and trends
within large, regionally connected areas that have
similar environmental characteristics
• “all” lands but “regional” resources
• “rapid” because:
• they synthesize existing information, rather than conduct research or
collect new data
• completed within 18-24 months
What is an Rapid Ecoregional
Assessment?
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Monitoring for Adaptive
Management
Ecoregional Direction
Field Implementation
Rapid Ecoregional Assessments
ScienceIntegration
Landscape Approach for managing public lands
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• Help managers address problems.
• Provide information that will be integrated into future management action.
• Improve understanding for the conditions of the resources within the ecoregion.
• Provides solutions to management questions.
• Aid in identifying regional priority areas for conservation of native plant, wildlife, and fish communities and other ecosystem resources.
• Establish baseline information for long-term monitoring of regional ecological components.
• Aid in identifying areas within the ecoregions where development activities may be directed to minimize effects upon important native plant and animal communities and other ecosystem resources or services,
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• Management Questions (MQs)
• Conservation Elements (CEs)
• Change Agents (CAs)
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1) Management Questions:
Ecoregional assessments are driven and guided
by management questions (MQs), which:
• Identify “regional” issues faced by land and other
resource managers.
• Provide a clear direction; they help focus the work
effort to the problems at hand.
• Help identify data needs and provide context to
issues; there is no reason to collect non-relevant
data.
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• 1. Which species makes up the largest share of subsistence harvests?
• 2. What is the socio economic profile for each community within the ecoregion?
• 3. Where are current and planed oil/gas activities and where do they overlap with CEs?
• 4. What habitats support terrestrial species of concern?
• 5. What suitable habitat for caribou would be available with climate change?
• 6. Where do CAs and CEs overlap?
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REAs geospatially describe the location of
“Conservation Elements”:
• Existing vegetation communities.
• Current occupied habitats for identified species.
• Areas that are comparatively ecologically intact and
areas that are comparatively disturbed.
• Regionally significant terrestrial vegetation and
aquatic ecosystems
• Regionally significant species and species
assemblages.
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Map their current distribution
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SNK
YKL
CYR
NOS
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BLM Project Lead
Agreements Partner: Alaska Natural
Heritage Program
Directing Body: Assessment
Management Team (AMT)
Expert Review: Technical Team
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• What do we want to develop, restore and conserve;
where; at what scale; and with what trade-offs?
• How should we organize ourselves, at every level
of the organization, to accomplish this?
• How should we engage our state, federal and NGO
partners, at every level, to accomplish this?
At the conclusion of these landscape assessments
Three basic and interrelated questions we should be
asking…..
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tQuestions?
