The Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative: An Approach to Landscape Scale Conservation in Southwest Wyoming.

The Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative (WLCI) was announced in February 2007 as a long-term, science-based effort with the goal to assess, conserve, and enhance fish and wildlife habitats while facilitating responsible development through local collaboration and partnerships.  The concept for the WLCI began in the spring of 2006 as Federal and State fish and wildlife managers identified the need for a landscape-scale approach to ensure healthy wildlife populations in areas with ongoing and proposed energy development. The accomplishment of landscape scale goals and objectives outlined in the WLCI Operation and Science Plan is unquestionably highly dependent on maintaining working relationships with multiple partners and agencies. Collaboration takes place through the efforts of multiple WLCI teams that are tasked with sharing information, prioritizing projects, and identifying greatest conservation needs and gaps in available science.  This collaborative approach exercised by WLCI is unique as it provides a means to address multiple concerns at a scale that covers all activities on the landscape, incorporates multiple needs in project implementation, and can leverage resources that might not be available to single agency projects.  Work in the 19 million acre WLCI area focuses specifically on activities that promote and maintain the health of sagebrush, mountain shrub, aspen, riparian, and aquatic communities.  The WLCI continues to employ an adaptive management strategy allowing refinement of priorities based on previous project locations and outcomes and anticipated future land development. To learn more about WLCI visit wlci.gov.