These documents, prepared by Sonia A. Hall and the Arid Lands Initiative (ALI) Core Team, articulate the shared biological, strategic, and spatial priorities of the ALI in the Columbia Plateau Ecoregion.
Excerpt from the executive summary:
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Eastern Washington’s arid lands are a diverse and productive landscape, with an intricate mix of shrub steppe, grasslands, wheat fields, irrigated crops, orchards and vineyards, wetlands, streams and lakes, and rocky outcrops and cliffs. This landscape supports over 235 plant and wildlife species, while producing billions of dollars in crops and livestock annually. To conserve this landscape and the biological, social and economic values it supports major challenges must be overcome, including those posed by the patchwork of land uses, and the equally fragmented and complex ownership patterns in this region. Successfully conserving a functioning landscape that supports healthy ecological systems and working lands therefore requires (a) action by multiple stakeholders across the ecoregion, and (b) sharing resources and coordinating these actions to achieve shared goals across this landscape.
Multiple state, federal and private entities are already taking conservation actions in many locations across eastern Washington’s arid lands. To address the challenges posed by landscape conservation in eastern Washington, a group of interested entities came together to form the Arid Lands Initiative (ALI) in 2009. The ALI core team began by articulating a shared vision for conserving a whole, functioning landscape across eastern Washington, which would support biological and socio-economic values. With the help of experts and stakeholders, we assessed the health of the ecosystems and species that characterize eastern Washington’s arid lands, and found a clear picture that encourages action across this landscape. Although these systems and species have undergone varying degrees of degradation, compromising their ability to provide wildlife habitat and economic goods and services, their recovery and restoration is still achievable.
The ALI core team, through a number of facilitated discussions, has identified the key components of a coordinated strategy to achieve the ALI’s shared vision. These foundational strategy components are:
- Shared biological priorities that capture what we are striving to conserve. We selected eight focal systems and species whose successful conservation is the foundation for achieving our shared vision;
- Shared strategic priorities that articulate what actions are necessary to conserve these focal systems and species, and whose coordination at a landscape scale is critical for achieving our shared vision; and
- Shared spatial priorities, which represent the areas where these actions need to be implemented first, in order to conserve those systems and species in ways that add up at the landscape scale
These shared priorities are meant to define specifically where the Arid Lands Initiative needs to invest to leverage each partner’s actions towards achieving the viable, well-connected system of arid lands and related freshwater habitats we envision. They also provide the foundation for engaging new partners with interests in implementing land use, land management and land conservation actions in key areas. Coordinating these actions across this arid landscape will result in these efforts contributing to meeting both local and landscape-scale objectives, thereby supporting habitats and species and the communities and livelihoods that depend on them across the whole region.
