North Forty News: “New Collaborative Approach for Watershed Health (Part 2)”
Working Together for Healthy Watersheds
In 1995, a diverse group of private landowners, public land agencies, and interested citizens banded together to find solutions to natural resource management issues in the North Fork of the Cache la Poudre Watershed (North Fork). This was not an easy task. The group, which became known as the Laramie Foothills Advisory Group (LFAG), built trust and understanding, first by recognizing they had more in common than they thought and second by agreeing on shared priorities for the North Fork. Ideas bubbled up out of conversations around kitchen tables and while walking the land and the first projects began working together across boundaries.
Then in 1998 Preble’s Meadow, Jumping Mouse was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Shock waves rippled through the North Fork watershed. Uncertainty abounded and challenged relationships developed. Instead of retreating, members of the LFAG stepped forward to work for seven years on a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP). The Livermore HCP for Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse was one of the first to be led completely by community members. Its strength lay in the collective care for the North Fork, existing good stewardship, a significant amount of existing healthy habitat, and, being community-based.
Time passed. More stewardship and conservation projects were completed, improving grazing, using prescribed fire, making fences wildlife-friendly, restoring habitat, protecting springs, and protecting lands from development. Successes were celebrated. Lessons were learned and shared. The HCP lingered without formal enactment while legal cases were fought, and recovery planning bumped along. Then, years later, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) completed a recovery plan published in 2018. The HCP directly influenced the Recovery Plan’s direction, which initiated a new approach – a community approach – to a listed species.
The first of several multidisciplinary teams to ensure the survival of the Preble’s mouse, a threatened mammal listed under the Endangered Species Act, formed in the North Fork. The team is known as the Poudre River Site Conservation Team (SCT) and is the first of its kind, designed to give a voice to local communities in the process of recovering the Preble’s mouse. The goal of the SCT is to work toward meeting recovery goals, striving to recommend simple, straightforward conservation tools for the restoration of public and private lands for habitat improvement.
