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Heart of the West Wildland Network
The Wyoming Basins ecoregion covers America's best remaining sagebrush steppe habitats, encompassing the northerwestern Colorado, northeastern Utah, parts of southeast Idaho, and Wyoming west of the Continental Divide. An area of high deserts punctuated by isolated mountain ranges, this area is the best remaining stronghold for the sage grouse, pronghorn antelope, ferruginous hawk, burrowing owl, and many other types of high desert plants and wildlife. The Heart of the West Wildland Network was designed to protect the habitats of the Wyoming Basins Ecoregion on a regional scale.
This area has mostly escaped from human settlement and agricultural development, and today remains on of the most sparsely populated parts of North America. As a result, the Wyoming Basins Ecoregion is one of the few places that have healthy, fully-functioning ecosystems with most (if not all) of their original flora and fauna.
The Heart of the West approach is an important alternative to the more common piecemeal conservation measures that only protect small parts of political units like counties, national forests, or BLM Field Offices. Such smaller-scale typically fail to encompass migration corridors or all of the year-round habitats needed by wildlife, and often do not provide connecting habitats that link wildlife populations together. Populations that are linked are less likely than isolated populations to suffer from the genetic problems that go with inbreeding, and are less likely to vanish in the face of human-caused habitat destruction or natural disturbances like fire.
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The Heart of the West Plan focuses on maintaining important core habitats that serve as population hubs for sensitive wildlife and connecting linkages that keep populations in these areas from becoming isolated. These areas are the top priorities for conservation attention, and between them is a matrix of "Sustainable Use Areas," where more intensive industrial activities are appropriate so long as they're done responsibly.
This plan was developed through an intensive, GIS-based scientific process, where the habitat needs of 20 key types of wildlife were overlaid over the distributions of habitats and current levels of human impact at the landscape scale. Computer algorithms then determined the core areas that would encompass the most important habitats to protect in the region.
Overall, this plan creates a regional-scale conservation network for future development and conservation in the high deserts of the Wyoming Basins Ecoregion, guiding conservationists to prioritize their efforts in the most important landscapes and showing industrial interests the places where development is most environmentally acceptable. The Heart of the West Wildland Network represents the most advanced and scientifically grounded effort to think big and create a sustainable blueprint for human development and wildlife conservation for the next century.
This conservation blueprint wes developed by the Wild Utah Project, in cooperation with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Center for Native Ecosystems, and numerous other conservation groups and experts.
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