Use of Regional Partnerships to Assist in Managing at-Risk Species.

Army regulations set forth policy, procedures, and responsibilities for the conservation, management, and restoration of land and natural resources consistent with the military mission and in consonance with national policies. They authorize installations to participate in regional/habitat-wide efforts to conserve candidate species and Army-designated species at risk (SAR). They further provide authority for managing SAR and their habitats. It has been suggested, and, in fact, recommended by the Army Species-at Risk (SAR) program, that proactive management before the species is listed may be a more effective way to improve the status of the species in the first place, and provide the same or similar benefits to it without the necessity to list at all. The procedure is called the Candidate Conservation Agreement, and has been used sparingly by the Army, and usually for species living in a very restricted area, such as the Camp Shelby Burrowing Crayfish. A CCA was developed for the Louisiana Pine Snake, a species restricted to Fort Polk and a few counties in Western Louisiana and Eastern Texas. The gopher tortoise, in contrast, is spread over several states, and hundreds of thousands of square miles, with an estimated 80% of its numbers not on Army or DoD land. The Gopher tortoise MOA and CCA were responses to these guidelines. The Army, starting in 2005, initiated the development of a nonbinding, but operationally useful, Memorandum of Agreement which brought together every state DNR, all major Federal land management agencies within the range of the tortoise, several NGOs and even representatives of the private forest industry. It is proposed that all proposed (and extant) interagency programs could learn from the successes and mis-steps of the gopher tortoise CCA working group and incorporate these lessons learned in future proposed programs as well as applying them to programs which are already in progress. The region-wide nature of the GT CCA group, as well as its multi-level (private, state and Federal members), and interagency membership provide an excellent opportunity for learning how better to implement future plans, while maintaining a common goal.