The Landscape Conservation Bulletin |
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A bi-monthly service of the Network for
Landscape Conservation
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Dear Network Friends,
Floods. Fires. Heat waves. It’s hard to avoid being concerned about the next calamity around the corner. However, summer is the ideal time to enjoy the great outdoors with our families and friends in the precious landscapes we hold dear. At Lake Tahoe, we are cherishing every moment this summer following last year's 220,000-acre Caldor Fire. We’re beyond grateful that no Tahoe homes were lost in that record-setting megafire, and are emboldened to know that our landscape-scale fire management strategies aided firefighters as they fought the blaze.
Our landscape conservation movement is at a critical juncture. Climate change impacts are dealing out calamity in real time, changing landscapes, habitats, and communities before our eyes. Our Network is proud to be a leading voice advancing the cause throughout North America. It’s becoming increasingly clear that if we are going to effectively address the interconnected climate, biodiversity, and environmental injustice crises, we must work across jurisdictional boundaries at the landscape scale.
My service for five years as co-chair of the Network for Landscape Conservation was one of the most rewarding endeavors of my career. I continue to be inspired by all who are coming together across the country to ensure our communities thrive despite the extraordinary challenges we face.
Enjoy this edition of our Bulletin!
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Appalachian Climate Corridor |
Additional Landscape Conservation News |
Landscape Conservation Job Board |
Webinars & Additional Resources |
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Julie Regan
External Affairs Chief & Deputy Director, Tahoe Regional Planning Agency
Network for Landscape Conservation Coordinating Committee and co-chair of the Communications Working Group
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Featured News
Connect and Protect: Building an enduring Appalachian Climate Corridor
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For nearly a century, the Appalachian Trail has existed as a backbone of conservation in the eastern United States. The footpath traverses a natural network of connected mountains, forests, rivers, and streams that is critical to adapting to a changing climate. Over the last two years, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, members of the Appalachian Trail Landscape Partnership, and dozens of other climate and conservation experts have convened to explore ways to enhance the climate resiliency of the Appalachian Trail landscape. These conversations have culminated in a report released this week, Conserving an Intact and Enduring Appalachian Landscape: Designing a Corridor in Response to Climate Change. This report builds awareness of climate change threats and highlights climate action opportunities to safeguard the region’s public safety, economic stability, and ecological health. It is a tool to integrate climate-smart actions into conservation strategies and strategic planning efforts, and demonstrates the potential within the Appalachian landscape to help achieve ambitious goals set by the U.S. government related to conservation, environmental justice, and the climate crisis. The report includes examples of programs that are advancing climate resiliency in the Appalachians, and a set of recommendations for improving ecosystem integrity and connecting people to nature. What emerges from this report is an inspiring vision for an Appalachian Climate Corridor: a connected and conserved landscape that protects the Appalachian Mountains so people and nature can thrive in an era of climate change. The Network will be hosting a Landscape Conservation in Action webinar on this vision in September—stay tuned for more details.
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Featured News
Dialogues aim to advance inclusive landscape conservation across the United States–Canada border
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The United States–Canada border has been called the world’s largest one-way mirror and is indeed the longest international land border in the world. This political divide has important implications for ecological and cultural resilience—not just in the narrow ribbon of the border region, but for landscape connectivity throughout North America: the border bisects enormous landscapes and cuts through many Indigenous communities whose territories were historically connected. Taking a more holistic, transboundary approach across this national border offers a tremendous opportunity for increasing landscape and cultural connectivity, improving the efficacy of existing conservation efforts, and helping both Canada and the US reach ambitious national conservation targets.
To help foster these outcomes, representatives from conservation organizations, Indigenous communities, government agencies, and civil society working near or across this boundary came together in 2021 to organize and participate in a series of four interactive virtual transboundary dialogues. Bringing together several hundred attendees and structured to focus on differing geographies and/or themes, these dialogues sought to explore common opportunities, challenges, success stories, and future needs around transboundary conservation. A small task force has been working to capture learnings from the dialogues and distill common themes and key ideas; this effort has culminated in a summary report, US–Canada Transboundary and Indigenous-led Conservation of Nature and Culture: Priority Recommendations. This report is intended to be a starting point for launching further conversation and stimulating concrete actions toward achieving durable conservation outcomes for the peoples and ecosystems that span this critical area.
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Additional Landscape Conservation News |
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The Water Solutions Network—recognizing our interconnectedness with each other and the natural systems in which we live— releases a Watershed Framework that is intended to provide a roadmap to help communities develop a cross-sector, collaborative, watershed-scale path toward climate resilience.
In a first, Utah's Bears Ears National Monument will be co-managed following the signing of a cooperative agreement between the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service and the five tribes that have inhabited the landscape for centuries: the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.
The Bears Ear example represents a larger trend of Native Nations in the North America reasserting their sovereignty—the cover story in the July issue of National Geographic explores this trend, highlighting the critical role that tribal sovereignty can play in efforts to address many of the complex challenges we face around climate and biodiversity. Similarly, an article in Yes! Magazine highlights a growing movement to reclaim water rights for Indigenous people.
Post from Civity focuses attention on the ‘relational foundation,’ underscoring the importance of taking time to invest in cultivating and stewarding relationships if we are going to successfully tackle systems-level challenges like the climate crisis.
Article in Civil Eats highlights the work of the InterTribal Buffalo Council and its efforts to revive Indigenous traditions and heal Indigenous communities by reconnecting people with bison.
A reflection piece in On Land plumbs the human relationship to place, and explores the meaning and potential of locally led conservation.
Anthropocene Magazine article highlights new research suggesting that nearly 50% of the world’s land needs conservation action to avert the biodiversity crisis.
Nowhere Left to Go: The Revelator excerpts from a new book that explores the connection between the climate and biodiversity crises, highlighting how climate change is threatening wildlife and how conservation at a landscape scale can offer solutions.
Synthesizing one of the largest road ecology research projects ever completed in the eastern US, the Wildlands Network and the National Parks Conservation Association release a new report identifying key hotspots for wildlife movement—and conservation strategies and opportunities—along a major highway in western North Carolina and East Tennessee.
Article from the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting highlights a new effort to create a federal funding program to accelerate efforts to conserve and restore the Mississippi River, modeled after a similar program from the Great Lakes.
A report from the California Natural Resources Agency highlights progress on the Cutting Green Tape Initiative, a statewide effort to accelerate the pace and scale of habitat restoration by streamlining and improving government processes.
MIT Technology Review article highlights the growing movement to build structures intended to mitigate the impacts of urbanization and roadbuilding on wildlife—focusing on the emergence of wildlife crossing infrastructure and the growing efforts to quantify the conservation impact of such infrastructure.
WBUR article highlights the launch of the Family Forest Carbon Program, which aims to support small private landowners in portions of the northeast in advancing “climate smart” forestry to capture and store carbon.
Forest Service Project Planning to Implementation: New guidebook from Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition provides a comprehensive review of the agency’s work process, from the earliest stages of project brainstorming through the final tasks of contracting out and monitoring planned management activities—with the intent to build practitioner knowledge about the agency programs, policies, and processes that are often key to conservation work in the West.
The Hispanic Access Foundation releases a new report highlighting opportunities to designate and protect new parks, waterways, and ocean and coastal areas throughout the United States that will serve Latino and other disinvested communities.
Interview with urban ecologist Eric Sanderson highlights the interconnected reality of cities within landscapes, and how weaving nature back into the fabric of our urban areas will be essential in the face of 21st Century challenges like climate change.
The United States Biosphere Network has a new organizational home, as it is now fiscally sponsored by the Center for Large Landscape Conservation.
The Cascades to Coast Landscape Conservation Collaborative releases a new report on habitat connectivity modeling of southwest Washington.
The Collaborative also hosted a webinar upon release of the report, highlighting why connectivity is essential, model results and public access, and a panel discussion on how connectivity information can be incorporated into management actions—View a recording of the webinar.
Article in Yale Environment360 highlights the growing body of research around the importance of large mammals to healthy ecosystem function, and how rewilding efforts across the global could contribute to solutions to the biodiversity and climate crises.
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Upcoming Conferences & Events
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Saint Paul, Minnesota
Note: will include both an in-person and virtual option
New Orleans, Louisiana
A virtual event
New Orleans, Louisiana
Connect with the Network for Landscape Conservation at Rally:
Paradise Valley, Montana
Gulf Coast, Alabama
Note: rescheduled to this September date from its originally scheduled March 29-31 dates
Denver, Colorado
Note: will include both an in-person and virtual option
Minneapolis, Minnesota
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Landscape Conservation Job Board
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Tribal Land Recovery Manager, First Light.
Connectivity Science Coordinator, Center for Large Landscape Conservation.
Director of Conservation, Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
Senior Communications and Special Projects Specialist, Salazar Center for North American Conservation
This section of the Landscape Conservation Bulletin is intended to be a space to share job postings that will be specifically relevant to landscape conservation practitioners. We welcome submissions: if your organization would like to widely distribute a posting please be in touch.
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Webinars & Additional Resources
Knoll Farms is hosting a four-day workshop, Facilitating for Change: Building Skills and Possibility in the New Era, in early September. Facilitating for Change provides participants a rich opportunity to gain personal awareness and explore real applications for how to improve their individual and group leadership skills at creating positive change with and among very different people.
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Effective Conservation: A virtual discussion with conservationist and author Ignacio Jiménez
A Wildlands Network webinar
An NPS Connected Conservation webinar
August 3, 2022
An NPS Connected Conservation webinar
September 13, 2022
An NPS Connected Conservation webinar
September 21, 2022
An Appalachian Trail Landscape Partnership virtual learning session
September 22, 2022
An NPS Connected Conservation webinar
October 12, 2022
Following cancellation of the 2020 Conservation Finance Boot Camp, the Conservation Finance Network compiled a 4-part video short course, which is available via the above link.
A weekly podcast that explores the challenges presented by adapting to climate change and the approaches the field's best minds believe are already working.
A podcast that explores the intersection of social and environmental advocacy, and seeks to uncover the actions people are taking around the world to showcase the symbiotic, yet sometimes tumultuous, relationship between people and nature.
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The Network for Landscape Conservation is the community of practice for practitioners advancing collaborative, cross-boundary conservation as an essential approach to protect nature, culture, and community in the 21st Century.
Contact Ernest Cook, Network Director, for more information.
Contributions of news, upcoming events, resources, and job postings for future Bulletins are welcomed. We also welcome inquires for potential future "Perspectives: Landscapes Conservation in Action" stories; please be in touch if you are interested in sharing stories and insights from your work.
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The Network for Landscape Conservation is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, P.O. Box 1587, Bozeman, MT 59771
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