Project Details

Since 2001 approximately $700,000 per year has been awarded to Utah by the federal State Wildlife Grants (SWG) Program.  These SWG dollars are currently matched on a 1:1 basis with state Species Protection Account (SPA) dollars, which together with SWG and diverse leveraged funds, are used throughout the state to manage species of concern and their habitats.

In 2003 Congress required every state and territory to generate a 10-year Wildlife Action Plan in order to continue receipt of SWG funds, before October 2005.  The second-edition, 2015 WAP was submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in August 2015, and approved in July 2016. The 2015 WAP is subject to amendment under guidance provided by FWS in 2017.

This project provides the dedicated link between diverse UDWR elements and partners.  Tasks include: 
*	Obtain rare Utah animal species locality data from multiple sources, including UDWR biologists, federal agencies, museums, non-profit organizations, researchers, and others. 
*	Quality control, standardize, and integrate all rare animal species locality data into the UDWR biodiversity database within one year of the date it is collected.
*	Provide precise sensitive species locality data to UDWR personnel and cooperating government agencies as necessary for planning, management, research, development, and other needs.  
*	Provide masked sensitive species locality information to the public upon request and via the UDWR's web site. 
*	Produce species distributions to address data gaps identified by the WAP 2015-2025.

The purpose of Utah's 2015 Wildlife Action Plan is to manage native wildlife species and their habitats, sufficient to prevent the need for additional listings under the Endangered Species Act. This project will result in more strategic and coordinated conservation actions, ensuring long-term benefits for species of greatest conservation need and the habitats that support them.

Provide evidence about the nature of the problem and the need to address it. Identify the significance of the problem using a variety of data sources. For example, if a habitat restoration project is being proposed to benefit greater sage-grouse, describe the existing plant community characteristics that limit habitat value for greater sage-grouse and identify the changes needed for habitat improvement.

The long-term goal of this project is to focus and coordinate efforts by UDWR and stakeholders to prevent ESA listings through direct and indirect actions, included on-the-ground and administrative threat abatement, as well as status assessment and monitoring.

The annual goal of this project July 1, 2025 - July 1, 2026 is to lead UDWR, partners, and stakeholders to develop and effect the infrastructure and workflow changes required to establish joint implementation and monitoring norms for the remaining fraction of the 2015-2025 planning period. The 2015 WAP, as amended, reflects updated conservation priorities, as well as remaining uncertainties and emergent threats, within a coherent planning framework of data, actions, assessment, and adaptation.

Project objectives include:
*	The UDWR WAP Implementation Team meets fairly regularly and effectively, to facilitate the translation of the WAP into annual work tasks. UDWR work plans are coordinated among DWR sections through the UDWR Wildlife Action Plan Implementation Team (WAPIT).
*	SPA and Utah's Watershed Restoration Initiative (WRI) have incorporated explicit priority threat & data gap abatement for current WAP SGCNs and key habitats, into their funding proposal databases.
*	The conservation needs of priority unlisted species are considered in local, state, and federal resource management plans and implementation activities.

Provide an overall goal for the project and then provide clear, specific and measurable objectives (outcomes) to be accomplished by the proposed actions. If possible, tie to one or more of the public benefits UWRI is providing.

LOCATION: Justify the proposed location of this project over other areas, include publicly scrutinized planning/recovery documents that list this area as a priority, remote sensing modeling that show this area is a good candidate for restoration, wildlife migration information and other data that help justify this project's location.

TIMING: Justify why this project should be implemented at this time. For example, Is the project area at risk of crossing an ecological or other threshold wherein future restoration would become more difficult, cost prohibitive, or even impossible.

List management plans where this project will address an objective or strategy in the plan. Describe how the project area overlaps the objective or strategy in the plan and the relevance of the project to the successful implementation of those plans. It is best to provide this information in a list format with the description immediately following the plan objective or strategy.

If applicable, detail how the proposed project will significantly reduce the risk of fuel loading and/or continuity of hazardous fuels including the use of fire-wise species in re-seeding operations. Describe the value of any features being protected by reducing the risk of fire. Values may include; communities at risk, permanent infrastructure, municipal watersheds, campgrounds, critical wildlife habitat, etc. Include the size of the area where fuels are being reduced and the distance from the feature(s) at risk.

Describe how the project has the potential to improve water quality and/or increase water quantity, both over the short and long term. Address run-off, erosion, soil infiltration, and flooding, if applicable.

Description of efforts, both completed and planned, to bring the proposed action into compliance with any and all cultural resource, NEPA, ESA, etc. requirements. If compliance is not required enter "not applicable" and explain why not it is not required.

Conservation actions for SGCN species and key habitats that will be accomplished under this proposal can roughly be categorized as on-the-ground work, impact analysis, inventory/monitoring, research, education, data management, coordination, and planning. Selected, but by no means exhaustive, examples of work expected this year follow:
-	Impact analysis: Work with UDWR biologists, federal land managers, and others to recognize and make recommendations to avoid/minimize/mitigate impacts to wildlife from development proposals; help create distribution and/or habitat maps for species for use in the impact analysis process; review various permit requests; respond to any ESA listing petitions. 
-	Inventory/monitoring: Work to identify species' occurrences, population status, and response to threats and management actions; design, analyze, synthesize, and supervise field projects.
-	Research: Address questions vital to management. We have internal projects, we work with local and distant universities, and we participate in regional- or national-scale efforts.
-	Education/outreach/dissemination: Citizen science efforts, public lectures, and field experiences; bird and nature festivals; manuscript preparation for peer-reviewed scientific journals; social media posts. Serve as the regional experts for all nongame-related questions and media requests.
-	Data management, coordination, and planning: WAP implementation coordination and planning; Species Status Assessment (SSA) data submission, participation, and review; Conservation Action Planning (CAP) for species and areas; UDWR strategic plan; coordination and communication with federal land management biologists; participation in many initiatives, teams, and working groups including WRI, candidate species working groups, species-specific recovery teams, etc; discovering, creating, entering, proofing, approving, and sharing species and habitat data.
For many of the listed activities, we seek additional funding through SPA and other state, federal, and private sources. Those funds are generally for seasonal field costs such as technicians, vehicles, supplies and materials, and other implementation costs. However, without this essential grant, we would lack the capacity to carry out most, if not all, of the duties of the Native Aquatic and Terrestrial Wildlife Conservation Programs

Describe the actions, activities, tasks to be implemented as part of the proposed project; how these activities will be carried out, equipment to be used, when, and by whom.

Describe plans to monitor for project success and achievement of stated objectives. Include details on type of monitoring (vegetation, wildlife, etc.), schedule, assignments and how the results of these monitoring efforts will be reported and/or uploaded to this project page. If needed, upload detailed plans in the "attachments" section.

List any and all partners (agencies, organizations, NGO's, private landowners) that support the proposal and/or have been contacted and included in the planning and design of the proposed project. Describe efforts to gather input and include these agencies, landowners, permitees, sportsman groups, researchers, etc. that may be interested/affected by the proposed project. Partners do not have to provide funding or in-kind services to a project to be listed.

Detail future methods or techniques (including administrative actions) that will be implemented to help in accomplishing the stated objectives and to insure the long term success/stability of the proposed project. This may include: post-treatment grazing rest and/or management plans/changes, wildlife herd/species management plan changes, ranch plans, conservation easements or other permanent protection plans, resource management plans, forest plans, etc.

Potential for the proposed action to improve quality or quantity of sustainable uses such as grazing, timber harvest, biomass utilization, recreation, etc. Grazing improvements may include actions to improve forage availability and/or distribution of livestock.