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Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative

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Can We Conserve Wetlands Under a Changing Climate? Mapping Wetland Hydrology in the Columbia Plateau
As the impacts of climate change amplify, understanding the consequences for wetlands will be critical for their sustainable management and conservation, particularly in arid regions such as the Columbia Plateau. The depressional wetlands in this region (wetlands located in topographic depressions where water can accumulate) are an important source of surface water during the summer months. However, their health depends directly on precipitation and evaporation, making them susceptible to changes in temperature and precipitation. Yet few tools for monitoring water movement patterns (hydrology) in and out of these landscapes currently exist, hindering efforts to model how they are changing. This project provided...
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This project identifies priority areas in the Columbia Plateau Ecoregion to implement conservation strategies for riverine and riparian habitat. This is tailored towards the Arid Lands Initiative (ALI) conservation goals and objectives, and provides the foundation for adaptation to a changing climate. This project adopts a “zoned” approach to identifying focal areas, connectivity management zones and zones for riparian habitat and ecological representation. Through a series of workshops and webinars, the ALI articulated its freshwater conservation goals and targets. Key aspects of these goals included: a focus on non-anadromous salmonid (salmon and steelhead) species, include riparian birds and waterfowl as key...
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The challenge of managing for invasive species creates an opportunity for the GNLCC to provide leadership on landscape scale stressors where there is a need for coordination of planning and on the ground activities. Currently, to the best of our knowledge, the north-western part of the North American continent remains free of quagga and zebra mussels. Infestation of aquatic systems in the GNLCC by quagga and zebra mussels would be economically, socially and environmentally devastating. An infestation in one of the jurisdictions within the mussel-free northwest would likely lead to domino effect. It is therefore critical that managers recognize the interconnectedness of the ecosystems comprising the GNLCC and take...
Presentation given at the 2014 North American Congress on Conservation Biology July 13-16, 2014 in Missoula Montana Abstract: The Crown of the Continent Ecosystem (CCE) is considered an ecologically intact ecosystem and one of the most diverse in North America, but like many natural areas, habitat fragmentation represents one of the area’s most pressing concerns. Species perceive and move through landscapes in different ways; understanding how these differences impact connectivity is vital to conservation efforts. Using resistant kernel connectivity modelling, this study explores connectivity in the CCE using a suite of hypothetical species to understand the synoptic patterns of connectivity in the CCE for multiple...
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