History of Engagement

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) was formally established in 1940 when the Bureau of Fisheries and the Bureau of Biological Survey were combined. The Service’s mission is to work with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. In many ways, the Service’s mission statement reflects an ecosystem services mindset, although the Service has never formally adopted such a framework for communications or decision making. In today’s political, social, and economic environment, it is increasingly important that the Service ably communicate to partners, stakeholders, and oversight officials how its conservation work affects and benefits the public. Adoption of an ecosystem services framework could help the Service in this endeavor. Such a framework may also help the Service better understand and evaluate the full suite of benefits and impacts associated with different management options and choices regarding the siting and expansion of wildlife refuges.

The Service does not explicitly use an ecosystem services framework to make decisions about natural resource planning, management, and land acquisitions and protection. However, in many contexts,such a framework could potentially help the Service improve its prioritization of conservation projects at both a local and national scale by more formally identifying direct and indirect benefits to and impacts on affected stakeholders and communities. Such understanding may potentially enhance support for conservation actions, improve outcomes of resource management and protection decisions, and point to nontraditional sources of funding to support these activities.

Decision Context: Refuge Planning

The National Wildlife Refuge System’s mission is to administer a national network of lands and waters for the conservation, management, and where appropriate, restoration of the fish, wildlife, and plant resources and their habitats within the United States for the benefit of present and future generations. The mission guides all activities, including resource planning and management undertaken at more than 560 refuges nationwide.

Several key statutes shape and guide refuge management:

• Refuge Administration Act: This act serves as the “organic act” for the National Wildlife Refuge System. It establishes a unifying mission for the system, a process for determining compatible uses of refuges, and a requirement for preparing comprehensive conservation plans. It affirms that the system’s primary mission is wildlife conservation, and it identifies six priority wildlife-dependent recreation uses. The act also reinforces and expands the “compatibility standard” of the Refuge Recreation Act, which authorizes use of refuge areas for any purpose, including hunting, fishing, public recreation, and accommodations, and access if the use is compatible with the major purposes for which the refuges were established.
• Refuge Recreation Act: The Recreation Act requires that recreational uses of the National Wildlife Refuge System be “compatible” with the primary purpose(s) for which a refuge was acquired or established.
• Endangered Species Act: The Endangered Species Act (1973), as amended, affects management activities within the National Wildlife Refuge System by directing federal agencies to take actions that would further the act’s purposes and to ensure that actions implemented, authorized, or funded do not jeopardize endangered species or their critical habitat. The act also provides authority for land acquisition. Conservation of threatened and endangered species is a major objective of both land acquisition and refuge management programs.
• Fish and Wildlife Act: The Fish and Wildlife Act of 1956 establishes a comprehensive national fish, shellfish, and wildlife resources policy with emphasis on the commercial fishing industry but also notes the inherent right of every citizen and resident to fish for pleasure, enjoyment, and betterment and to maintain and increase public opportunities for recreational use of fish and wildlife resources. The 1998 amendments to the act modified the powers of the Secretary of Interior with regard to volunteer service, community partnerships and education programs.

Consistent with these laws, the National Wildlife Refuge System has identified four challenges for refuges across the country. A constrained fiscal climate means that the system lacks the necessary resources to undertake all of the necessary actions to fully address these challenges. Projects must be selected with consideration of the returns on investment, and the system will be held accountable to the American public for effective use of scarce resources. The four key challenges are

• Climate Change—Climate change is resulting in widespread, large-scale transitioning of ecosystem composition, structure, and functioning, which has implications for refuge purposes and refuge system policies. One of the primary proposed mitigation strategies for climate change is carbon sequestration. The refuge system sequesters a substantial amount of carbon through wetlands, grasslands, and forested areas, and it further contribute to carbon sequestration through habitat protection, management, and restoration.
• Water Quantity and Quality—The system experiences competition for water availability, which is becoming an increasingly critical issue for maintaining healthy habits for fish and wildlife. Water quality is also a concern both in terms of clean water for wildlife and the quality of water entering and leaving refuges. As states identify impaired waters, refuges may be asked to alter management operations, such as limiting wetland drawdowns after a certain date to help the impaired water body from exceeding maximum pollutant loads, but doing so can affect the quality and quantity of refuge aquatic habitat.
• Invasive Species—Refuge lands now host more than 2.3 million acres of invasive plants and more than 4,400 invasive animal populations. Invasive species, along with habitat loss and human exploitation, are the chief causes of decline in global biodiversity. The Service identified some $166 million in unfunded invasive species projects in fiscal year 2007. The Service will have to prioritize projects to ensure that the selected projects provide the greatest returns in addressing invasive species threats and associated ecosystem services.
• Conservation Biology and Landscape-Level Conservation—The confluence of global environmental and ecological changes is stressing natural systems and posing a growing challenge to conservation of Fish and Wildlife Service trust resources. Refuges are increasingly threatened from pressures “beyond the borders.”

Having a better understanding of the physical relationship between refuge lands and how they are managed in light of the associated impacts to surrounding communities would help the Service bring more diverse partner organizations into the planning and management process and would foster support for the mission of the Service and the refuge system. Development of an ecosystem services framework tailored to a local level would help the Service address this challenge.

At a local scale, refuge management must balance multiple options for management actions against management objectives, including how refuge-specific management objectives comport with national challenges. In these situations, using an ecosystem services approach to planning would allow the refuge program to also consider how conservation-related management actions affect surrounding communities and stakeholders. For example, restoration of native vegetation undertaken to enhance habitat for native species may also provide water quality improvements or reductions in fire risk that would benefit downstream or downwind communities. Improved understanding and communication of such co-benefits, though not required of the refuge system, could lead to opportunities for cross-jurisdictional collaboration.

One refuge where an ecosystem services perspective illuminates co-benefits and thus partnership opportunities is the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. At that refuge, modification to natural hydrology, coupled with increases in the incidence of drought, has led to more frequent, more severe, and longer wildfires in peat bogs. The resulting smoke has been linked to increases in hospital admissions in downwind communities. Reducing the fire risk would be beneficial both for the listed species for which the refuge is managed and for nearby residents.

Enhanced cross-jurisdictional collaboration could achieve co-benefits at the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge as well. The refuge and the surrounding communities could jointly benefit from an improved ecosystem services framework that would help promote collaboration between the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service to better evaluate how potential land parcels contribute to specific, shared goals (such as air and water quality improvements or carbon sequestration) on a landscape scale.

An ecosystem services framework could guide large-scale landscape conservation plans and designs for the Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses the entire Connecticut River watershed within the four states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. This refuge must be managed through a multi-partnership collaboration in which the Service is a leader but not the sole decision maker regarding land use or management actions. An ecosystem services framework could help communities better measure and understand how physical changes in the landscape or in land management actions affect the watershed in terms of water quality, flood control, and increased biodiversity and could help them better understand the payoff from conservation-related investments. Such a framework could also help communities better understand their co-dependence on one another in terms of upstream and downstream actions and consequences and could allow community leaders to garner local support for projects and investments that may flow to others in the watershed. Landscape-level planning within a watershed with such divergent and independently organized communities and multiple land uses is a difficult task. An ecosystem services framework could help unify the communities around a shared vision of how they want to interact with their natural environments to achieve multiple social, economic, and environmental goals.

Key Players: Refuge Planning

If the National Wildlife Refuge System were to utilize an ecosystem services framework in resource planning and management activities, multiple parties would be involved at different levels, depending on the scale of the analysis. For planning that takes place at the refuge scale,key staff would include refuge management and planners. Local partners would vary by location but could include local governments, regional mobility authorities, non-profit and community organizations focused on public health or environmental issues, landowners, and local, state, and federal resource or regulatory agencies. In the context of regional collaborations, such as joint planning and prioritization efforts at a large landscape scale,refuge staff would likely help form teams of stakeholders to develop jointly acceptable strategies to accomplish shared goals and missions.

Legal and Management Context: Refuge Planning

The primary guide for management activities by the National Wildlife Refuge System is the system’s mission to administer a national network of lands and waters for the conservation, management, and where appropriate, restoration of the fish, wildlife, and plant resources and their habitats within the United States for the benefit of present and future generations. To implement this mission, each refuge develops a management plan that advance the refuge’s identified goals and objectives. Development of these plans is open to public input,but they little reflect how management actions affect communities and natural environments outside refuge boundaries. Future plans will have to better reflect how refuges fit into the broad landscape in terms of services they provide and non-refuge habitat areas that are equally important for the survival of trust resources. Moreover, they will likely have to include strategies to reach out to other landowners, both public and private, to encourage land stewardship.Use of an ecosystem services framework could help the refuge managers better understand how their actions not only affect fish and game populations but also provide ancillary benefits to themselves and their neighbors. A credible ecosystem services framework could also help identify beneficiaries who might contribute funding or other resources to implement such actions at a level commensurate with expected ecosystem service benefits.

Any use of ecosystem services approaches within the Service must be consistent with the agency’s mandate and activities. Beyond these requirements, state or local guidelines or concerns could influence an individual refuge’s implementation of such approaches. For example, in California, state legislation requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could serve as an incentive for a refuge to assess its potential to produce carbon offsets. Local desires for shoreline protection, water and air quality improvements, or additional green space could similarly encourage a refuge to assess its potential to provide such benefits.

Methods, Tools, Capacity: Refuge Planning

Refuges have a wealth of data and expertise related to species and habitat but limited resources for engaging stakeholders and considering the value of ecosystem services. With no onsite social scientists and economists, they rely on a small number of economists at the Service’s headquarters. Refuges may also have limited capability to undertake GIS (spatial) and data analysis in new ways. In a recent survey of refuges in the western United States, many respondents requested assistance with such analysis. In some cases, staff may be able to augment their own resources with local and regional data developed by partners (e.g., regional planning agencies, municipalities, NGOs, universities). The FWS Division of Economics has conducted some pilot studies of ecosystem services valuation and the benefits that refuges provide to nearby populations and has deep experience with a variety of economic issues. The concept of ecosystem services is relatively new for the agency, however, and training on both the ecological and the economic/social sides of ecosystem services analysis would be useful.

Agency Examples

The FWS developed three agency examples for this guidebook:

Incorporating Consideration of Ecosystem Services into Plans for the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge describes refuge contributions to recreation, air and water quality, climate regulation, public health, and tourism in surrounding communities and the potential of an ecosystem services approach to affect these co-benefits while pursuing its primary responsibility of implementing a habitat management plan.

Incorporating Consideration of Ecosystem Services into Plans for the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge describes partnering opportunities and explores the ways that an ecosystem services approach to planning could help the partners achieve multiple shared goals.

Using an Ecosystem Services Management Framework to Pursue Watershed-Wide Project Priorities in the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge and Connecticut River Watershed describes the considerable effort devoted to developing and organizing partnerships throughout the Connecticut River watershed to protect and enhance that ecological system and all of the native species dependent on it. That effort entails development of an ecosystem services framework to show how communities are receiving both direct and indirect services from the watershed and to illuminate the actual value of these services so that active management of the underlying resources can be promoted and supported.

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