In late March, a working group of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which represents North America's state fish and wildlife agencies, developed a white paper on landscape conservation collaboration. The white paper identifies key challenges and lessons learned for landscape conservation, and emerged from the AFWA working group that was convened to examine existing landscape partnerships and their governance structures, commonalities of success, approaches, partner roles and other attributes. Beginning first at a regional level, the white paper reviews efforts in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and Western regions to understand key drivers, challenges, and successes for collaboration in each region. A broader discussion across regional contexts follows, and the white paper concludes by identifying opportunities and next steps. One of the recommendations is to host a forum to gather input from broader audiences, including NGOs -- the Network for Landscape Conservation has been in discussions with the AFWA working group chair to convene this type of forum later this summer. Another recommendation that is now being worked on is to expand a set of best practices that were developed by the Northeast states and included in the white paper.  

The Network for Landscape Conservation has published a new report, Assessing the State of Landscape Conservation Initiatives in North America. The summary report builds upon the collective data that emerged from the 130 landscape conservation initiatives that responded to the 2017 NLC survey. The report highlights key insights on the current state of landscape conservation, while also providing a summary of the results and analysis of the collective body of data. 

From 2012 to 2015, western states faced uncertainty around the greater sage-grouse: would the sage-grouse listed as an endangered species? Would mitigation be required even if it was not listed? And how would potential mitigation requirements impact local economies and culture? Eoin Doherty of Environmental Incentives shares the story of Nevada's bold and proactive response to this uncertainty in this month's Perspectives article. With the development of a state sage-grouse conservation plan, Nevada put compensatory mitigation principles to work in crafting a Conservation Credit System. Work at the landscape scale increasingly requires practitioners to identify ways to balance community resilience, human development, and conservation, and compensatory mitigation is one tool to help navigate that balancing process. The article explores some of the innovations utilized in Nevada, with the hope that the learning that's happened in Nevada may be applicable and valuable in a host of different contexts.