About the Project
The Challenge

A New Way of Doing Business

The HPP Strategy

The High Plains Partners

Support

New Developments
Ranch Conversations Scheduled for February in New Mexico

1999 Annual Meeting of the Lesser Prairie Chicken Interstate Working Group (10/29/99)

Funding Sought for Lesser Prairie Chicken Conservation (10/8/99)

Reports
Assessment and Conservation Strategy for the Lesser Prairie-chicken

(Copies of the following reports are available by contacting WGA)

Let's Get to It -- Getting Beneath Difficult Environmental Resoruce Debates (1998)

Two Futures -- Citizens Define Ways to Manage Glacial Lake Agassiz Ecosystems 1996)

A Way of Life -- Great Plains Citizens Talk about Ecosystems

Related Links

WGA Contact
Sylvia Gillen

The High Plains Partnership
for Species at Risk

Conservation of the High Plains Legacy

The High Plains Partnership is a cooperative conservation effort involving state and federal agencies and private landowners from Montana to Texas. The goal of the partnership is to work across traditional public and private boundaries to reverse declining populations of wildlife by implementing voluntary, community-based solutions to natural resource problems on the High Plains.

The Challenge

For a variety of reasons, many wildlife species are declining within the region's grasslands. Several species have been proposed as candidates for protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), including the lesser prairie chicken, mountain plover, swift fox and black-tailed prairie dog, just to name a few. Declines may be related to loss and fragmentation of suitable habitat, increasingly large areas being cultivated for crops, drought, loss of playa lakes, lack of a natural fire regime and the replacement of native grasses with exotic grasses.

As the first High Plains Partnership project, the Lesser Prairie Chicken Interstate Working Group was established in 1996 to help identify solutions to reverse the decline of the lesser prairie chicken. The group is a coalition of wildlife and natural resources agency professionals from Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, where populations of lesser prairie chickens still exist.

The working group was formed to improve coordination of information, data collection and research, and to develop recommendations for improved policy and program implementation strategies. The project area is a unique landscape that supports communities with a rich agricultural heritage and provides short- to mid-grass prairie habitat for this rare grouse.

With more than 90 percent of the High Plains region privately owned and more than 70 percent of lesser prairie chicken habitat existing on private land, it is imperative that landowners, government, and others become partners to achieve the goals of everyone. The working group and local landowners will become partners in conservation. Jointly, they will develop strategies to sustain the agricultural community and benefit the lesser prairie chicken, initially, and other grassland wildlife species in the future.

The best way to ensure rangeland health and reverse declines in these species is through regional collaboration and voluntary cooperation in which landowners work in partnership with government agency staff to make a difference on their land.

A New Way of Doing Business

The Western Governors' Association has coordinated activities of the HPP and acted as fiscal sponsor since 1996. Lessons learned from HPP and other initiatives helped the governors identify several common themes present in successful efforts in environmental protection and community sustainability. A result of this experience was the February 1998 adoption of a policy resolution entitled "Enlibra: A New Shared Doctrine for Environmental Management in the West."

Enlibra represents the beginning of a new paradigm for environmental management in the region. This doctrine supports local leadership to resolve environmental challenges and seeks to identify incentives that will help landowners and others take actions to enhance the environment and achieve economic productivity. It is also focused on: balance and stewardship; greater public participation and collaboration in resource decision-making; outcomes rather than just programs; and a recognition of the need for a variety of tools beyond regulation and litigation that will improve west-wide environmental and community well-being.

The HPP Strategy

The HPP is a comprehensive, incentive driven, voluntary program with five objectives.

Answer applied research questions about the relationships between wildlife and habitat

• Habitat and genetic studies are underway in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas and Kansas.

• 30,000 newsletters and surveys were distributed across the five-state region.
• A "Ranch Conversations" have been held in Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. More than 120 people--80 of whom were landowners--attended the first meeting in Buffalo, Oklahoma in January 1999.
• An educational video is being developed.

• Over 40 ranchers in Northwest Oklahoma have volunteered to serve on a lesser prairie chicken task force, and half of those have offered the use of their land as a demonstration area.
• Conversations are underway with landowners in other areas in hopes of establishing additional demonstration sites.

• A conservation agreement has been completed between a private landowner in Colorado and federal and state natural resources agencies.

• Funding is currently being sought to support this objective as a future activity of the HPP.