The Scientific Foundations of The WGA CHAT

In 2007 the Western Governors passed Policy Resolution 07-01 that established the Wildlife Corridors and Crucial Habitat Initiative. This resolution set in motion for the first time a west wide effort to develop a common definition of crucial habitat. Crucial habitats are places containing the resources, including food, water, cover, shelter and “important wildlife corridors,” that contribute to survival and reproduction of aquatic and terrestrial wildlife and are necessary to prevent unacceptable declines, or facilitate future recovery of wildlife populations, or are important ecological systems with high biological diversity value.   To define these areas, the western state fish and wildlife agencies agreed on standard ecological categories that states would use to map crucial habitat, including significant habitats of fish and wildlife species of concern, habitats of economically and recreationally important species, important connectivity and corridor linkage areas, native and unfragmented landscapes, riparian and wetlands, and other lands protected for fish and wildlife values. The participating states agreed to use west wide datasets in each of these categories were available, and were encouraged to use more local data when data were more accurate and certain.  The states recognized the concern that a lot of the data were limited by direct known observations and that lack of data did not mean lack of importance. The state adopted a landscape integrity approach to map lands in the west with the least amount of human footprint. These areas were assumed to have value to native fish and wildlife even though observational data were missing.