WSRRI Spatial Priorities

Given the extent of habitat loss across the shrubsteppe landscape, all remaining habitat has conservation value. Yet there is a need to prioritize action to realize the best conservation outcomes over time. WSRRI's approach is to strategically target collaborative conservation investments, including funding, capacity, and on-the-ground actions. To do so, WSRRI is generally following a recently developed, proactive conceptual model applied throughout shrubsteppe landscapes in the American West: “Defend the Core, Grow the Core, Mitigate Impacts” (WGA 2020; NRCS 2021; Doherty et al. 2022). This framework requires a landscape-level assessment of habitat quality. It then serves to focus conservation investments in and around high-quality ‘core areas,’ where investments are most likely to be effective and cost efficient, and away from more degraded areas where they may be highly costly and ineffective. Across the American West, this proactive approach has helped change the conservation narrative into one that begins with protecting healthy landscapes that have no threats or low-level threats and expands outwards towards more threatened and impaired areas (Doherty et al., 2022). WSRRI's spatial priorities provide a view of core areas and areas where cores can be expanded within Washington. In addition, maintaining connectivity between areas of high-quality habitat is critical in Washington, due to fragmentation across our shrubsteppe landscape. WSRRI therefore expands this framework to include connecting the core.

• Defend the Core. Defending high-quality core habitat from encroachment of threats, like development, conversion, loss due to wildland fire, and invasive annual grasses, must be the highest priority for WSRRI. Aggressive action to keep core areas intact and healthy is paramount to building resistance and resilience in these places.

• Grow the Core. While core areas are being defended, action should also be taken in lesser quality habitat surrounding and adjacent to core areas, called 'growth opportunity areas,' to expand the footprint of high-quality habitat. While defending our existing core areas is essential, growing the core is a necessity for long-term conservation and recovery of shrubsteppe habitats and wildlife.

• Connect the Core. Connecting the core requires action to maintain, over time, open and viable linkages between core areas, called corridors, so that wildlife can continue to move across the landscape and access high-quality habitat as conditions change. Such movement allows for effective demographic and genetic exchange between populations, increasing the resilience and viability of the regional network of habitats.

Beyond defending, growing, and connecting the core across the shrubsteppe landscape, the need will remain to mitigate threats to habitats, wildlife, and human communities. Example mitigation actions that will be important for all remaining shrubsteppe habitat include containment and control of invasive annual grasses and wildland fire suppression and recovery.

Mapping Priority Areas

To target WSRRI investments strategically and geographically and facilitate the collective approach to Defend the Core, Grow the Core, and Connect the Core, WSRRI partnered with TerrAdapt, a non-profit organization, to implement a collaborative process to identify spatial priorities for Washington. TerrAdapt uses remote sensing and Google Earth Engine to dynamically monitor habitat and connectivity, project future conditions given future climate and land-use scenarios, and prioritize areas for conservation actions to increase resilience.

Through a co-development process centered around three working groups comprised of Tribal, agency, and non-profit scientists and practitioners, we mapped Core Areas, Growth Opportunity Areas, Corridors, and Other Habitat:

• Core areas (Cores) - Core areas are those with the highest quality habitat across the shrubsteppe landscape. Actions targeted in core areas should focus on protecting existing habitat, as protecting intact high-quality habitat is more efficient than restoring it after disturbance or degradation, as well as threat prevention and abatement. Where disturbances occur in core areas despite protection measures, restoration or enhancements should be high priorities to quickly recover habitat quality.

• Growth Opportunity Areas (GOAs) - GOAs are areas with significant amounts of habitat, though it is more degraded than habitat in core areas. Through restoration, habitat quality could increase, thus growing the core. Restored areas within GOAs should then be protected from further threats to protect our investments over time.

• Corridors - Corridors provide paths for wildlife that are relatively free of movement barriers; these paths connect the network of cores and GOAs across the landscape. Further barrier development (e.g., road construction, significant habitat conversion, and development) should be avoided in corridors to maintain their ability to connect high-quality habitat.

• Other Habitat - These areas include remaining habitat, but that habitat is too highly degraded, due to patch size or isolation, to be included in core areas, GOAs, or corridors. For long-term conservation of shrubsteppe habitats and species, however, these areas are still important to maintain as habitat and, if and where resources allow, their condition improved over time.