Heart of the West
The Problem. Here in the Rocky Mountains and intermountain west, native biota and the wild places in which they once flourished have been degraded and fragmented by human activity. A few of these practices include off-road vehicle use, fire suppression, clear cutting, grazing and tens of thousands of oil and gas developments, along with a dizzying network of roads that accompany them. Faced with these kinds of damaging activities on the landscape, the conservation community often finds itself on the defensive, fighting dams, roads, timber sales, subdivisions, and oil wells on an individual basis. Under these circumstances, its difficult to craft a positive vision that can garner significant public support.
Wildlands network design; from science to on-the-ground protection. The Wild Utah Project and our mentoring organization Wildlands Project, along with many scientists and other conservationists, believes that the long-term solution to habitat degradation and fragmentation in our region lies with the design and implementation of an integrated landscape wildlands network. Such networks typically consist of core wilderness areas connected by landscape linkages and surrounded by compatible use zones. Core areas remain wild and undeveloped. Landscape linkages, necessary to overcome habitat fragmentation, link core areas to enable wildlife to move and ecological process to flow between core areas. The compatible use zones that surround core areas accommodate increasing levels of human activity. However, compatible use zone activities such as silviculture, agriculture and other uses occur in deference to the needs of ecosystems. (click HERE to see how conservation planners decide what areas should be managed as core areas and linkages)
The Heart of the West. Recently, a number of biologists and conservationists noted a critical yet unaddressed piece of the "puzzle" that links other reserve design projects between the northern Rockies and the southern Rockies. The Heart of the West region spans southeast Idaho, southwest Wyoming, northwest Colorado and northeast Utah. There was a call to map critical areas of habitat that should be protected to ensure connectivity across the landscape, and maintain viable populations of species within the Heart of the West.
Once referred to as the Serengeti of North America, much of this area is dominated by the high plains of the Great Divide Basin. It was in this area that pronghorn, elk, bighorn sheep, and vast herds of bison once moved through sagebrush steppe, followed closely by the plains wolf, grizzly bear and the nomadic Indian tribes of the Great Plains. The region also includes the Wind River and Wyoming Ranges of Wyoming, the high Uintas and the Book Cliffs of Utah, and the Park Range of Colorado. This "heartland of the Rockies" encompasses the entire Green, Bear, Uinta, and Sweetwater river basins, as well portions of the Platte, Snake, Big Horn, Wind and Colorado river watersheds.
This vast and varied landscape is home to many species of native fauna and flora, many now at risk. For thousands of years the Heart of the West area has provided migration corridors for large mammals, effectively linking populations of animals in the northern Rockies with populations in the southern Rockies. Today, exponentially increasing human use of the area is destroying and fragmenting the biological fabric of the land. For example, approximately 90% of the federal land in southwest Wyoming is currently leased for oil and gas development, with 6,000 to 11,000 new wells projected by 2015. In Utah's part of the Heart of the West, as many as 5,000 new wells are proposed for the same period.
These, and several other serious threats require our immediate attention. Unless we move quickly to design and implement a system of connected wildland cores throughout this region, we stand to lose much of the natural heritage, as well as the opportunity to preserve and restore gene flow between populations of animal and plant species existing to the north and south. The very success of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project (both Wildland Project affiliates) will depend on successfully linking them via a healthy Rockies Heartland.
In 1999, The Wildlands Project and numerous cooperators identified this critical region where no organization was actively working on wildlands network and implementation, and organized an effort to begin a Wildlands Network Design (WND) for this area, and write a Conservation Plan to accompany the WND. To date, Heart of the West partners include Wildlands Project, Wild Utah Project, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Western Wildlife Conservancy, the Wilderness Society, and the Center for Native Ecosystems.
Goals and Objectives for the Heart of the West Conservation Planning Effort.
Heart of the West Project Activities, Products and Progress
