Science >>Strategic Habitat Conservation
Strategic Habitat Conservation
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been entrusted to safeguard our Nation's fish, migratory birds, aquatic species, endangered and threatened species, and public lands. The unprecedented scale and complexity of challenges we face in the 21st century, however, require us to expand our vision for conservation and the partnerships we work with to achieve it.
To ensure a bright future for fish and wildlife in the face of widespread threats such as drought, climate change and large-scale habitat fragmentation, we can no longer base our actions solely on past experience and success. We must conserve landscapes capable of supporting self-sustaining populations of fish and wildlife, while also providing for the needs of people. Conserving these large landscapes, which are subject to multiple changing pressures and uncertainty, will require application of the best available science at every step.
Strategic Habitat Conservation (SHC) is the conservation approach adopted by the Service that establishes self-sustaining populations of fish and wildlife, in the context of landscape and system sustainability, as the overarching target of conservation. SHC relies on an adaptive management framework to inform decisions about where and how to deliver conservation efficiently with our partners to achieve predicted biological outcomes necessary to sustain fish and wildlife populations.
View a presentation on SHC: Utilizing the Principles of Strategic Habitat Conservation in the Rocky Mountain Front Conservation Area (PDF: 3.3 MB)
