The Program Committee for next year's North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference just announced the event's Special Sessions, described below.

The 76th North American will be held March 14-19, 2011, at the Westin Crown Center in Kansas City, Missouri. The four concurrent Special Sessions will follow the plenary session on Wednesday, March 16.

Special Session 1. Integrating Aquatic and Terrestrial Resource Management Cochairs:
Jon Haufler, Ecosystem Management Research Institute (Jon_Haufler@emri.org)
Bruce Rieman, USDA Forest Service (retired) (brieman@blackfoot.net)

Increasingly, conservation planning emphasizes a broad-scale perspective that looks across ownership boundaries to coordinate conservation, management and restoration activities at landscape or watershed scales. This is especially important given the predicted impacts of climate change, current efforts to reduce increased risks of wildfire, widespread effects of increased human populations and impacts, and related matters.

An important issue that can limit success is the integration of aquatic and terrestrial management. Terrestrial approaches often emphasize vegetation management to achieve ecosystem restoration and/or fuel mitigation objectives, and to reverse decades of changes caused by past resource uses and losses of natural disturbance processes. Aquatic managers often focus on protection of remnant populations and on improving watershed integrity through such efforts as reducing the impacts of roads and improving streamside condition. In many areas, the management activities desired by terrestrial managers may include mechanical treatments, prescribed burning, or chemical control of invasive species. These activities often require road networks for access and may disturb lands and soils in the short term to achieve longer term desired conditions. Aquatic managers seeking to minimize sediments to streams and maintain remnant fish populations may resist these terrestrial treatments as further disruption of already compromised watersheds. Aquatic managers may focus on actions such as closing and decommissioning roads and protecting areas from additional disturbances and in turn, meet objections from terrestrial managers who need access to accomplish their management projects. Terrestrial managers may argue that without proper management, uncharacteristic wildfires may further threaten both terrestrial and aquatic resources, while aquatic managers may be more concerned with the persistent negative consequences of human influences on proper stream and river functions. Because terrestrial and aquatic systems are linked inextricably through watershed and ecological processes, there should be substantial opportunity for collaboration.

This Special Session will examine both the opportunity and conflict in terrestrial and aquatic management, with a focus on developing more-integrated restoration that can benefit entire landscapes/watersheds and not just single resource issues.

Special Session 2. America's Great Outdoor Initiative: What's in It for Wildlife?

Cochairs:
Christy Plumer, The Conservation Fund (cplumer@conservationfund.org)
Jim Kurth, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Jim_Kurth@fws.gov)

On April 16, 2010, President Obama announced the "America's Great Outdoor Initiative" (Initiative). The Presidential Memorandum directed the Secretaries of the Departments of Interior and Agriculture, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality to lead the efforts to develop a 21st Century Strategy for America's Great Outdoors. Prompted by the nation's growing disconnect with nature and the outdoors, natural resource fragmentation and deterioration, and the lack of outdoor activities with family and children, this Initiative is intended to engage partners and community-driven efforts. The efforts will be focused to conserve land, water, wildlife, historic, cultural resources and enhance public understanding and active enjoyment of these outdoor resources.

The goals of the Initiative are threefold. First, it will strive to reconnect Americans, especially children, to the nation's landscapes, waterways, ranches, farms, forests and coasts. Second, is to build on current public and private priorities to conserve outdoor resources, establish corridors and connectivity across outdoor resources. Third, it is to use science-based management to restore and protect land and water resources of the nation for the benefit of future generations.

This Special Session will report on progress to date on each of these goals. Based in part on a mandated report to the President, due November 15, 2010, session participants will hear a discussion of the assessment of current successful nonfederal conservation approaches. Presenters will report on an analysis of existing federal programs that may complement those approaches and proposed strategies to achieve the Initiative's goals. In addition, session participants will be presented with an action plan to meet the goals of the Initiative. Session presenters will include Administration officials, state fish and wildlife agency leaders, and non-governmental organizations. Conference attendees interested in the federal government's signature conservation legacy effort are encouraged to attend.

Special Session 3. Finding Meaning and Opportunity in Landscape Conservation Cooperatives

Cochairs:
Mike Carter, Playa Lakes Joint Venture (mike.carter@pljv.org)
Gabrielle Horner, The Nature Conservancy (ghorner@TNC.ORG)
Ross Melinchuck, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (Ross.Melinchuk@tpwd.state.tx.us)

Increasingly, the challenges facing 21st Century conservation surpass the resources and jurisdictional boundaries of the various state and federal agencies charged with stewardship of North America's natural resources. Unprecedented demands on and expectations of the nation's native ecosystems call for integrated management strategies capable of addressing landscape-level dilemmas created by such stressors as climate change, fragmenting habitat, and energy and housing developments. Conceived in the Department of the Interior, Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) are ambitious "management/science partnerships" designed to target conservation concerns of ecologically connected landscapes through coordination of biological management, conservation prioritization, research planning and monitoring programs for high-priority fish, wildlife and plant populations.

While ambitious in their goal to fuse a "seamless national network" of "applied conservation science partnerships" to "support conservation at landscape scales," LCCs are, as yet, vaguely defined, undemonstrated and unapplied. In theory, their potential to realign nation-level conservation with the scale, complexity and pace of ecosystem resource management is vast. In practice, their success will hinge, like the ecosystems they seek to conserve, on the sum parts of the whole.

This Special Session will explore how LCC planning and implementation is being conducted, what opportunities state agencies and NGOs have in the LCC process, how sustained funding should be secured and prioritized, and what criteria will be used to select target eco-assets.

Special Session 4. Mitigation Funding in Wildlife Conservation: Does Anyone Have A Plan?

Cochairs:
Timothy Male, Defenders of Wildlife (timothymale@gmail.com)
Timothy Dicintio, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (Timothy.Dicintio@NFWF.ORG)

"Mitigation" is generally defined as those actions taken to avoid, minimize, or compensate for losses to natural resources?including wildlife?caused by development and other "permitted" activity. The requirement to mitigate is most often set forth in the permit, license or other authorization that allows the development or other activity to proceed.

One traditional method of satisfying a mitigation requirement is the payment of a fee or other monetary assessment. In theory, these types of payments are managed and applied in some coherent fashion to fund projects designed to offset the relevant losses. Compensatory mitigation funding may be directed to projects aimed at offsetting the specific types of loss caused by a particular project or, alternatively, may be pooled and applied to larger-scale projects intended to reap more systemic conservation benefits.

Mitigation funding for wetlands and wildlife is currently estimated to exceed $4 billion per year. These funds flow to or through at least four federal departments and numerous agencies, more than 85 state agencies, and dozens of nongovernmental organizations. Despite the massive resources in play, overall coordination of mitigation funds across all the disparate stakeholders is something that occurs only rarely. Coordination efforts are further complicated by differing legal requirements, agency missions, trustee interests and occasionally competing conservation priorities. It seems self-evident that coordination among mitigation funds, projects, and organizations is essential to maximize their short-term benefits and long-term impacts. So why isn't this happening?

This Special Session will examine the current legal and regulatory structure that gives rise to mitigation funds (primarily in the case of threatened and endangered species, secondarily in the case of wetlands), critique the existing means through which mitigation funds are managed and dispersed. Examples of innovative, multi-agency, multi-trustee conservation projects will be highlighted. It will address potential policy and regulatory changes that may improve coordination and implementation among federal, state, and NGO stakeholders, with the ultimate goal of substantially increasing the conservation benefits of mitigation funding.