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Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks

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Crown of the Continent Landscape Conservation Design
FY2019Multijurisdictional, international landscape with many shared priorities but lacks landscape (inter-jurisdictional) perspective. Landscape conservation design process will provide landscape context and future scenarios to support coordinated conservation investment.FY2020Entering Phase 2 of a 3-year project, a Landscape Conservation Design (LCD) will deliver a set of strategies that the Crown Managers Partnership and dozens of stakeholders can deploy to achieve desired ecological conditions based on defined, measurable resource outcomes across the Crown of the Continent ecosystem. LCD is a holistic, participatory process bringing stakeholders together to define a desired future for the Crown landscape and...
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Informing Multi-scale Strategic Habitat Conservation for Priority Grassland Birds in the Northern Great Plains
Grassland birds have declined more rapidly than any other group of land birds in North America in the last 50 years, with populations of Spragues Pipit, Chestnut-collared and Thick-billed Longspur, and Bairds Sparrow having declined 65-94% during this period. Developing strategic conservation plans for grassland birds requires an understanding of their individual population ecology, along with their community dynamics amongst species. Few studies have focused on understanding how adult density during the breeding season relates to nesting performance (e.g., nest density and nest success) and how abiotic and biotic factors influence these individual demographics. This proposed work complements concurrent studies...
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A Science-based Decision Support Tool for Prioritizing Mitigation of Road Impacts on Western Governors Association Wildlife Corridors
This project aims to provide large landscape practitioners of the U.S. Northern Rockies with a decision support tool for prioritizing conservation action to mitigate road impacts on wildlife corridors. We will overlay analyses of corridor network centrality with analyses of wildlife-vehicle collision risk to identify where high-importance corridors meet high-impact road segments. Our findings will establish a rigorous, transparent basis for focusing road mitigation efforts where they will yield the greatest benefits to region-wide connectivity, and will be conveyed in the form of web-based map tools, a comprehensive written report, and a workshop for large landscape practitioners.Objectives:The primary objective...
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A New Model of Watershed-scale Aquatic Monitoring from the Crown of the Continent: Quantifying the Benefits of Watershed Restoration in the Face of Climate Change
This project will support the design and development of a large-scale aquatics monitoring program across 1.5 million acres of the Crown of the Continent, as part of a 10-year, landscape-level restoration project established and funded by the U.S. Forest Service in 2010. The Forest Service has directed each of ten Cooperative Forest Landscape Restoration Program projects to develop and implement a large-scale monitoring program to inventory current resource conditions and facilitate the short- and long-term evaluation of the effectiveness of restoration projects to inform future management strategies and actions: the work proposed here would address significant challenges associated with maintaining or improving...
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Species Adaptations to Climate Change: Baseline Data for Grassland, Sagebrush, and Riparian - Associated Landbirds in Bird Conservation Region 10
This region-wide coordinated bird monitoring program, supported by state, federal, tribal, nongovernmental organizations, and two statewide bird conservation partnerships, is designed to provide spatially-referenced baseline data for science-based biological planning and conservation design for the Great Northern LCC and its partners that is directly comparable with other landscapes and BCRs. We are requesting a third year of funding to continue sampling in BCR10 Montana and Idaho to enhance our ability to make robust inference to bird populations on grassland, shrublands, and riparian systems. These data currently are being used by project partners to develop spatially-explicit models that will allow assessment...
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