BLM Utah Grant: Special Wildlife Inventory for Conservation in Color Country District

Objectives: BLM Utah, Color Country District is looking to partner with an organization to establish and implement a special status species and special wildlife inventory and monitoring program within the Color Country District. This project will focus on data collection pertaining to a wide array of special status species including presence/absence, nest locations, species distributions den locations, breeding and brood rearing data, identification of migratory flight paths, etc. Information obtained through this project will provide valuable information to the BLM and other stakeholders regarding special status species and/or special wildlife within respective areas. This information will better equip stakeholders in analyzing potential impacts to the species from projects and to provide answers to other inquiries about these species. This data will assist the BLM in making management decisions in facilitating the efficient design and/or projects of wildlife study plans.
Examples of efforts for this project include golden eagle and other raptor nesting inventories, raptor migration inventories, kit fox monitoring, acoustic bat monitoring, greater sage-grouse inventories and habitat monitoring, geodatabase development and possibly plant inventories. The work for 2016 is primarily focused on inventories for Sage grouse in the Color Country District.

Public Benefit: The public benefit of this project is to monitor and inventory, and forecast future conditions for target species such as Greater Sage-Grouse. With this data the BLM will be able to assess the benefits of the Best Management Practices applied at the project level and determine if connectivity between populations is occurring. The BLM will also be able to assess if the protections allowed through the land use plans are appropriately applied on the project scale to adequately protect habitat for things such as migration. Through these efforts the BLM can work to better preserve habitats and the species that rely on those habitats for future generations and work to keep species off the endangered species list. By reducing the potential for species listing less public dollars would need to be expended in the future for species benefit.