The Department of Interior's Landscape-scale Approach to Managing Cultural Resources

Secretarial Order 3330 Improving Mitigation Policies and Practices of the Department of the Interior was signed by Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell, in October of 2013. It requires that DOI bureaus adopt and landscape-scale approach to mitigating the effects of development in order to ensure better outcomes for conservation and historic preservation while providing greater certainty to the proponents of development projects.  As part of efforts to implement that order, DOI is developing guidance for its component bureaus on how to approach the management of cultural resources at a landscape scale.

This paper is intended to provide a preliminary view of that effort while it is underway, and to solicit feedback from practitioners of large landscape conservation . Topics to be addressed include integration of cultural resource and natural resource data, the challenges of mitigation banking for cultural resources, and approaches to developing the broad strategic vision of what resource values to manage for at a landscape scale. While the current effort focuses on meeting the requirements of Secretarial Order 3330, the landscape-scale approach to resource management being developed has broader utility, including in the areas of climate change adaptation and disaster response.