Strategic Habitat Conservation
The Right Conservation in the Right Places to Benefit America's Fish and Wildlife
The Fish and Wildlife Service, its employees and partners over the past century have built an extraordinary legacy of conservation. The Service's leaders have committed to pursue landscape conservation through its Strategic Habitat Conservation framework - a framework pioneered by our partners at the Nature Conservancy. This framework and our strong partnerships will pave the way forward for us through the next century in our conservation work. Over time, our goal is to provide the tools needed to implement this framework focused on population objectives and take the next bold steps in our conservation work across a suite of challenging issues including the most compelling one of our time -- accelerating climate change.
To ensure we're "putting the right conservation in the right places," the Service and the U.S. Geological Survey proposed 22 Landscape Conservation Cooperatives nationwide, including five in the Southeast: Appalachians, Gulf Coast Plain and Ozarks, Gulf Coast Prairie, Peninsular Florida and South Atlantic. The geographic areas provide a spatial frame of reference for building and targeting science capacity that will support conservation strategies and landscape scales.
Over the next 12 to 18 months, the Service will work with employees, states and other conservation partners to consider necessary refinements to the LCC geographic areas.