Redefining
the way humans live
within rural and wild areas
The presence of
wildlife and habitat are primary reasons
for the surge of development in rural Montana and elsewhere in the
West. Paradoxically, this very development threatens their existence.
People want to live close to nature while still maintaining modern
comforts and access to urban amenities. Unless large-scale planning is
used to maintain wildlife and habitat at the population level, wildlife
resources and human quality of life, will decline.
Developers,
planners, landowners, conservationists and other stakeholders
must
work together to balance development on private lands with the
tolerances of wildlife.
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Gravelly
Mountains, west side of
Madison Valley
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CERI has developed a powerful
conservation planning framework to incorporate
current scientific information
about wildlife conservation into land-use planning and policy. Using
GIS-based tools, this
framework provides a step-by-step
process for setting conservation objectives and producing appropriate
development criteria based on these objectives. It
is designed to protect wildlife values through
solid planning prior
to development, minimize negative impacts to wildlife during
construction and
encourage sound wildlife stewardship following construction.
This project is
located in
the Madison Valley of Montana which lies between public lands in the
Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. CERI began conservation planning in the
area in 2001 and completed a broad-scale analysis in 2004. In 2005 and
2006 CERI collaborated with the Wildlife
Conservation Society (WCS) to
identify local conservation needs and set priorities in Madison Valley
resulting in the detailed Madison Valley Wildlife Conservation
Assessment (Brock et. al. 2006).
This assessment has already been
effectively applied in the county subdivision review process, helping
to guide development within important wildlife areas.
To strengthen the
effectiveness of land use planning in
the valley, CERI worked with Madison County planner, state and federal
agencies and
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community
stakeholders, to develop a wildlife conservation overlay
district. In June
2008, maps and guidelines for the overlay district were completed,
identifying
the most important areas withing the valley that may warrant special
mitigation
for development in order to protect wildlife and their habitat.
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Field mapping in the
Madison Valley
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CERI's
Goals
- To foster a more complete
understanding of the relationship between development and wildlife
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To create a conservation planning
framework that will guide development such that wildlife-human
conflicts are reduced
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To establish standardized tools
that can be applied throughout the Northern Rockies so that communities
can better preserve the wildlife and wild landscapes of their region
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The
Tools
CERI is developing three levels of tools:
1) Tools to look at
future and existing landscape
conditions (e.g. growth
and habitat modeling)
2) Policy tools to
look at the landscape generically
- How
much development can
take place
so that wildlife can
persist (Density/connectivity - min.
habitat area
requirement
and
disturbance distance)
3) Planning tools
to look at project/site level
- Is this
amount
of development OK? Evaluates existing or
proposed development
patterns
The immediate outcome of the
project will be to maintain critically important wildlife linkage areas
for recovering and expanding populations of grizzly bears, wolves,
wolverine, and lynx, while maintaining a long distance pronghorn
antelope migration corridor and also providing important habitat for
species of special concern such as boreal toads and brewers
sparrows.
CERI plans to replicate this
conservation planning model throughout Montana. By sharing this model,
communities can actively participate in managing developing landscapes
while at the same time maintaining Montana's wildlife legacy.
Ultimately we expect this project to become a model for a
paradigm
shift in the way humans live within rural and wild areas, and where
humans live as part of, rather than apart from, nature.
