Development of a Conservation Management Plan for the Idaho National Laboratory Site

Conservation planning is most likely to have a positive impact on natural resources when the product helps managers take action to ameliorate the root causes of threats and to monitor appropriate indicators that will inform adaptive management. Multiple stakeholders are often involved in plan development, and it can be difficult to achieve consensus in identifying the greatest threats to conservation targets, the drivers of those threats, and the best strategies for ameliorating such. The Wildlife Conservation Society led a multi-stakeholder team in applying a relatively new, yet widely used method know as Open Standards for Conservation (OS) to assist the U.S. Department of Energy, Idaho Operations Office (DOE), in developing a conservation management plan for the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Site. The INL Site serves as a science-based, applied engineering national laboratory that supports DOE missions in nuclear and energy research, science, and national defense. The planning team identified nine conservation targets and 10 threats that directly impact those targets. Resource experts helped develop conceptual models that explicitly outline drivers of threats (i.e. contributing factors) on the INL Site. Strategies were then developed to address contributing factors and an explicit theory of change (i.e. results chain) was created to show managers the team’s hypothesis about how strategy implementation would produce measurable results. The conceptual model and results chain also provided a framework for developing a plan to monitor (1) strategy implementation, (2) threats, and (3) status of conservation targets. I show how this method forms the basis for improved decision making, and share lessons learned while trying to balance DOE mission needs with biodiversity conservation. Quinn Shurtliff, Wildlife Conservation Society, 120 Technology Dr., Idaho Falls, ID 83402 qshurtliff@wcs.or