DIRECTOR'S CORNER --

This message from Sam D. Hamilton, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Southeast Regional Director. was directed to Service employees throughout the Southeast.

A wise person once said that the one thing that remains constant is change. Whether we resist it or embrace it, change will have its way with us and the world around us. There is, for example, the change that has come to us in the Southeast Region recently with severe weather events that have impacted our field operations. There is also change in the world’s climate that is demanding of us a more strategic approach to our conservation mission. And of course, there is the change that we face in a few months as Service employees and as citizens with the advent of a new Administration and a new Director. I am of the mind that change offers us both challenges and opportunities, with the ultimate outcome depending largely upon how we respond.

The road of change can sometimes be bumpy, even uncomfortable, but it may lead us to new possibilities we hadn’t envisioned before. As a case in point, over the last year we have experienced significant changes in our Human Resources operations, many of them difficult for everyone involved. Now, these changes are now beginning to pay off as we forge ahead in creating a Human Capital Management “Most Efficient Organization” that will better serve the needs of our programs and field stations.

Change often moves us to look more deeply at what we most value and to find new ways to achieve those things that are important to us. For example, we who have dedicated our professional lives to the conservation of our nation’s fish and wildlife resources have seen human-induced changes to the natural world that we find very distressing. Yet out of that distress has arisen in us a more urgent commitment to the critters, new and innovative approaches to our conservation mission, and an even deeper realization of the fact that we as a Service can’t do it alone.

No better example exists of the potential payoff from a creative response to change than the recent events at Brosnan Forest, a timber and wildlife preserve located 35 miles northwest of Charleston, South Carolina. Owned by Norfolk Southern, one of the nation’s premier transportation companies, Brosnan Forest is of great ecological significance. The Forest is one of the few remaining locations of mature longleaf pine habitat in the Southeast and encompasses the headwaters of the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto (ACE) Basin, one of the largest intact coastal ecosystems on the East Coast.

In 1999, in response to the dire need of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker for habitat, Norfolk Southern enrolled Brosnan Forest in one of the most innovative wildlife conservation programs ever devised—Safe Harbors. The Safe Harbor concept was developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Defense Fund in recognition of the fact that private landowners were the key to turning around the changes that were occurring in the American landscape as a result of development. Safe Harbors encourages private landowners to restore and maintain habitat for endangered species without fear of incurring additional regulatory restrictions. The Safe Harbor program worked on Brosnan Forest. Today, nine years later, the Forest is home to the largest known population of endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers (79 clusters) on private lands in the Southeast.

But Norfolk Southern didn’t’ stop there. A few weeks ago, the company took the unparalleled step of permanently protecting 12,488 acres of the Brosnan Forest from development through a conservation easement to the Lowcountry Open Land Trust--the largest easement ever made by a corporation in South Carolina.

I recently had the honor of joining with 100 folks representing conservation organizations and agencies from throughout South Carolina and the Southeast for a dedication ceremony for this donation. It was a thrill for me to take part in recognizing Norfolk Southern for its vision in striking the balance between economic profit and protecting rural lands and wildlife values that the people of South Carolina and the nation cherish. Talk about a courageous response to change: In the face of disturbing changes in landscapes across America and in spite of unsettling changes in the nation’s economic outlook, Norfolk Southern stepped up and voluntarily did a great thing for wildlife and for people. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.

//s// Sam D. Hamilton

Wildlife conservation and our changing climate

Sea turtles are losing nests and habitats. Sooty terns are nesting several months earlier than previously known. Songbirds are arriving on the gulf shores earlier each spring. Fish and mussel populations are strained by warming of waters as well as an increasing demand for water because of drought. Waterfowl are changing their winter distribution and abundance. Armadillo and fire ant ranges are expanding rapidly marching north and east. Invasive plant species are thriving in longer growing seasons.

Many ecological variables contribute to these changes. As biologists, managers, and conservationists, we have an obligation to ask questions and experiment with our assumptions to serve our wildlife mission. And now, those questions have to include climate change: How is a changing climate contributing to ecological changes that impact wildlife populations and distribution? Is climate change accelerating these changes? Would we recognize climate change impacts if we see it?

Those who study climate patterns agree the expected patterns of climate have changed over the last several decades; in fact, ask any gardener or back-yard birder if they’ve noticed changes blooming patterns or nesting and migration patterns. The difference now, according to experts, is the accelerated rate of those changes. For the most effective conservation measures now and into the future, it is critical to remember that fish and wildlife, in turn, began either adapting or losing ground to changes in climate long before many of us understood or acknowledged our climate is, indeed, changing.

How do we, as conservationists, begin to tackle hard questions about our fish and wildlife conservation mission? Questions that seem so much larger than the place where we work? Our ability to develop and implement conservation strategies to help wildlife adapt to climate change requires the kind of conservation framework embraced by Strategic Habitat conservation. For the Service to meet its mission over the next 50 years, this landscape-level conservation model provides a working framework within which we can engage our partners to help us determine desired population objectives for fish and wildlife, design landscapes to sustain those populations, deliver conservation in the most important places, and then, monitor and adapt our management practices as we learn from both success and failure.

Here in the Southeast under Regional Director Sam Hamilton’s leadership, a team of roughly a dozen people came together representing all of our programs to think through some of these issues. This team is framing climate-related issues in terms of four broad categories: wildlife adaptation to climate change, carbon sequestration, mitigation – our carbon footprint, and communications, awareness, and education.

In the realm of wildlife adaptation, for example, we are developing a GIS database to help guide us regionally as habitats and wildlife distribution changes. With that, we working closely with USGS on a hypothesis-based research project that will predict climate change impacts to fish and wildlife across the region. Soon, we’ll be linking nationally to an effort that identifies those species most vulnerable to a changing climate. The team also has an ongoing project to develop and maintain “current issues” database that will include the kinds of work taking place related to climate around the region. The team is exploring avenues to incorporate climate change impacts and management actions from capacity building to adaptive management at landscape scales into Service documents including comprehensive conservation plans, biological opinions, recovery plans, and joint venture management plans, among others.

The Southeast is a leader in using the emerging market in carbon sequestration as a tool for habitat restoration for wildlife using the tool to add 40,000 acres of land to the refuge system and restore a total of 80,000 acres to native habitats for fish and wildlife. The team is continuing that work and developing methods to expand it to new areas regionally and nationally.

These are a few examples of our first attempts to address wildlife response to climate change so far aimed at keeping the Service in the forefront of fish and wildlife conservation. As we proceed, specific management recommendations will emerge both from the team and from land managers learning how to adapt to climate change on the ground. We recognize that not all area or resources will be affected by climate change in the same way, or in the same time period; but we do know that we will all have to stand together to address current climate change issues now, and that we will all have to adapt in order for wildlife to adapt.

Over the next six weeks, you will see the first big steps our agency is taking to position itself as the leader in a collaborative effort within the fish and wildlife conservation community to adapt to accelerated climate change, building capacity through partnership, and bolstering a century-long legacy of innovative conservation. An ambitious draft strategic plan to guide our effort over the next five years is being completed by a team Service employees - your peers. Soon you will be asked to review it and provide comments on it and a range of activities that will serve as next steps for our generation's work to conserve America's fish and wildlife in a changing climate.

To learn more about the impacts of accelerated climate change on fish and wildlife and their habitats, please visit www.fws.gov/southeast/climate/.

Submitted by Bob Ford, Climate Team Leader, Southeast Region