Conserving the Future | Vision | National Wildlife Refuge System

Since 2010, the National Wildlife Refuge System has embarked on strategically and collaboratively addressing the mounting challenges faced by conserving America’s wild plants, fish, animals and their habitats in our rapidly changing world.

The efforts have culminated in an array of plans and products that strive for new ways to conserve America’s wildlife and wildlife places. Plans focus on SCIENTIFIC EXCELLENCE at a LANDSCAPE SCALE for the BENEFIT OF A DIVERSE PUBLIC while nurturing the NEXT GENERATION of conservation leaders with the ultimate goal of increasing efficiency, transparency, and relevance to better deliver wildlife conservation for the American people.

Explore all the tools and plans that were created to help us all realize this vision.

We are a science-based organization. We subscribe to the highest standards of scientific integrity and reflect this commitment in the design, delivery and evaluation of all our work.

Human demands on the environment combined with environmental stressors are creating an urgent need for innovative conservation choices. The scale of issues and challenges we face is unprecedented and impacts us all. Explore how we intend to scale up to landscape thinking.

American society is more ethnically and socially diverse (2010 U.S. Census data) than any other time in history, and this diversity will only increase into the future. The National Wildlife Refuge System must also evolve to better serve this diverse public by meeting them where they are.

The vision outlines a path to deliberately developing a diverse, inclusive, competent and caring workforce that will commit to conservation, embrace the responsibility of public service, and succeed in realizing this in effective, efficient and innovative ways.

The publication entitled, Conserving the Future: Wildlife Refuges and the Next Generation, is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s bold, new vision for the National Wildlife Refuge System. The Service released Conserving the Future as the culmination of 18 months of study and public conversation about conservation and the future of the Refuge System.

From the vision’s 24 Recommendations a numbers of strategic plans and products have been produced. To explore these, visit: SCIENTIFIC EXCELLENCE on a LANDSCAPE SCAPE for the benefit of a DIVERSE PUBLIC while nurturing the NEXT GENERATION of conservation leaders.

You can still visit the archived America’s Wildlife.org website to learn more about the vision conference, implementation teams and engagement of partners.