A 21 st Century Management-Science Partnership: Landscape Conservation Cooperatives.

1. A 21st Century Management-Science Partnership: Landscape Conservation Cooperatives. • 21st Century Challenges demand new capacities to comprehend problems across large scales, but still design and target site-scale efforts. • These capacities are inherently scientific and technical, but they should be directed by and toward resource managers, and they should be shared across management organizations. • LCCs are shared management-science partnerships involving federal agencies, states, tribes, NGOs, universities, and NGOs. They house capacity for biologically-based assessment and planning to inform strategic responses to broad-scale forces, like changing climate. • The Service hopes to help catalyze a national and international network of LCCs that collectively develops shared science capacity, information, and decision support.

2. The Architecture for a Network of LCCs: A national geographic framework. • A national geographic framework is needed to provide spatial context for biological planning and conservation design at landscape and population scales. Just as flyways were used to build shared capacities and cooperative frameworks to manage waterfowl. • Put more simply, the framework is designed to put science in the right places so resource managers have access to the necessary information and decision-making tools they need. This is particularly important as we work together to develop national strategies to help wildlife adapt in a climate-changed world. • The Service will use the framework as a base geography to design the first generation of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), and in planning a second generation of LCCs during the FY 2011 budget formulation process.

3. Building a Prototype Geographic Framework • A team of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) experts from across the country designed the prototype framework map. Service executive leaders approved the map with slight modifications in August 2009 • The 22 Geographic Areas were principally developed by aggregating Bird Conservation Regions (BCRs), biologically based units representing long-standing partnerships that facilitate conservation planning and design at landscape scales. • BCR boundaries were slightly adjusted by considering Freshwater Ecoregions of the World as a standard unit for aquatic species considerations -- the same framework adopted by the National Fish Habitat Action Plan -- as well as existing ecological units (Omernick’s Level II) to account for a variety of species needs.

6. What should state partners know about the national geographic framework? • During the next 12-18 months, the Service will work with states and other conservation partners to refine the framework as necessary. • For example, how to incorporate marine ecosystems and defining a structured, criteria-driven process to consider and recommend any needed refinements in the framework based on employee and partner input. • The geographic areas outlined in the framework are boundaries, not barriers. They are designed to help us identify the right science capacities, and put them in the right places to support shared management planning and delivery. • Unprecedented climate change makes our work all the more urgent. • FWS has $20 million and USGS $5 million, in FY 2010 budget.