Drawing from the Center’s experience in collaborative forest restoration and management, this report examines the challenges and opportunities relating to climate adaptation implementation and larger scale conservation by focusing on specific lessons learned from a landscape-scale, on-the-ground project within the Yellowstone to Yukon region.
Along the remote border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the Kugitang Mountains are home to a unique mix of species and ecosystems, from Eurasian lynx and markhor—the world’s largest wild goat—to fragile cave systems and alpine grasslands. Since 2020, the Center for Large Landscape Conservation has led a collaborative effort to strengthen protected area management, monitoring, and connectivity in this region, with support from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund. The project unfolded in two phases: first focusing on Koytendag State Nature Reserve (SNR) in Turkmenistan, then expanding across the border to Surkhan SNR in Uzbekistan.
U.S. Department of the Interior Publication: Applying landscape-level approaches to resource management allows the U.S. Department of the Interior and its partners to address problems they cannot resolve alone. Furthermore, this approach advances social, environmental, and economic goals shared across federal, state, and tribal governments and with non-governmental partners. This guide provides best practices, tools,
Final report for the LISA Project, funded by USAID, which seeks to understand the challenges and barriers that slow the adoption and implementation of safeguards that protect Asia’s diverse wildlife species and their critical habitats from the region’s rapidly expanding linear infrastructure.
In 2022, states across the country have passed legislation to take advantage of historic, new federal funding for wildlife crossing structures. Over just the past six months, seven states have enacted laws that set aside the required state match to federal grants for infrastructure projects that reconnect habitat. Many of these state policies also facilitate coordination between transportation and natural resource agencies—as well as collaboration with diverse stakeholders—to identify projects that will most effectively reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions and improve habitat connectivity.
State fish and wildlife managers recognize that keeping landscapes connected is an important conservation tool. Yet there is growing evidence that the impacts of climate change are already altering the needs and behaviors of animals, creating new patterns of movement throughout the landscape. Staff from the Center recently contributed to a new toolkit offering guidance on protecting wildlife movement and corridor habitat in the face of a changing climate.
The last time I was in Kenya, I flew home to the U.S. on March 3, 2020, blissfully unaware that the entire world was about to upend itself due to COVID-19. I had been living in Kisumu full-time, finishing my Master of Environmental Management degree, and only expected to spend three months in the U.S. for a short-term consulting gig and graduation. But those few months turned into a long-term move back and I secured a role with the Center for Large Landscape Conservation.
This is a watershed moment for conservation in the United States. The Biden administration’s America the Beautiful initiative—along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Law—is driving unprecedented levels of funding into the restoration, stewardship, and conservation of our lands and waters. But this influx of federal project delivery funding reveals a gap that needs to be filled: the on-the-ground capacity to get the work done. The Catalyst Fund, with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, aims to build capacity and help local and regional partnerships contribute toward achieving national conservation goals.
The report from the Connectivity Conservation Workshop: Guiding the Carpathian Region has now been released. It details the outcomes of discussions among over 50 scientists, conservation experts, natural resource managers, and policymakers from 13 countries that met in Poiana Brasov, Romania from 4-6 November 2019.
This report details monitoring and conservation activities carried out throughout 2024 in different areas across Turkmenistan, primarily focused on the Persian leopard, their prey, and sympatric carnivores, and on strengthening the management of Koytendag State Nature Reserve. It includes a set of formulated recommendations for consideration by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
