In 2004, the FWS, Fisheries and Habitat Conservation program created the Military Conservation Partner Award to recognize military installations that have accomplished outstanding work in cooperation with the Service to promote conservation on military lands during the previous year. For example, in 2018, the award was given to Camp Blanding, FL. The FWS, the military and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission signed a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances (CCAA) in 2017 to boost the base’s conservation efforts and keep nearly two dozen at-risk fish and wildlife species off the Endangered Species list. Under the CCAA, landowners voluntarily commit to conservation actions to help stabilize or restore a plant or animal species. These activities collectively help to preclude the need for a threatened or endangered listing. In return, the military gets some regulatory certainty and a promise that, even if a plant or animal is added to the threatened or endangered list, training may continue37.
The award was created to highlight the conservation benefits of partnerships between the military and the FWS, and to identify important criteria for selecting installations for the award. The following criteria categories, or some variation thereof relevant for a given partnership, can be helpful to installations when building conservation partnerships large and small38.
Communication and cooperation with partners (area of highest emphasis)
Issues resolution, success and effectiveness
37 https://www.fws.gov/southeast/tags/military-conservation-partner-award/
38 https://www.fws.gov/habitatconservation/Award_Form.pdf
Program diversity
Service policy and regulation compliance
The Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) Program has developed a series of primers designed to facilitate a better understanding among partnership stakeholders, including military installation leadership, state, regional and local government officials, land trusts, and communities. These primers provide tools and suggestions for establishing and maintaining effective relationships and partnerships to address the challenges of encroachment, but are relevant to other partnerships as well (more on REPI below). The following primers are available for download from the REPI website39:
Guidance on the essential elements and lessons learned by participants in the Sonoran Desert Ecosystem Initiative are particularly relevant to this discussion (Chambers and Hall 2005). The project’s relatively long timeframe (1998 to 2005), large geographic scope (Sonoran Desert Ecoregion’s 55 million acres), and diverse partnerships involving many federal and state agencies, universities, and nonprofit conservation organizations make it particularly rich in lessons that can be applied to future work. Lessons learned are organized into three main categories: (1) partnerships, (2) results, and (3) public involvement. Within each category, the authors describe lessons first in general terms and then provide examples from the Initiative.
39 https://www.repi.mil/Resources/Primers.aspx
Next Page: Types of partnerships
Author
David S. Jones, RA IV, Ecologist/Project Manager
Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands
Warner College of Natural Resources
Colorado State University