NAWPA Temperate Grassland Landscape Conservation

In 2013 the North American Intergovernmental Committee on Cooperation for Wilderness and Protected Areas Conservation (NAWPA Committee, made up of Parks Canada, CONANP, US Fish and Wildlife Service, US National Park Service, US Forest Service, and US Bureau of Land Management) agreed there was a need for NAWPA agencies to proactively examine the adequacy of the North American conservation estate and to reinforce connectivity and to support the joint management of functionally-resilient landscapes. Working with temperate grasslands as a pilot area, analyses concentrated on twelve major grassland ecosystem types that occur across the Great Plains and Chihuahuan Desert regions. These analyses have documented trends in the historical loss of these grassland types due to agricultural conversion and infrastructure development, identified many at-risk species associated with these grassland types, and documented the proportions of each type occurring within current protected areas. To further support the NAWPA agencies and to address the mission of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, this project then aimed to advance conservation towards CBD 2020 target 11 by representing the diversity of these temperate grasslands in Grassland Potential Conservation Areas (GPCAs). These areas could provide one important focus for conservation actions to secure or restore grassland habitat. NatureServe ecologists and spatial analysts used grasslands distributions, managed areas, already proposed conservation areas, landscape resiliency measures, and available distributions for species of concern to identify efficient configurations of Grassland Potential Conservation Areas (GPCAs) for augmenting the grassland conservation estate.

A presentation on this effort is found here: https://youtu.be/McVhFeVy-hs

Photo credit: Rick Bohn, US FWS