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Creating a Conservation Plan for Latah County, Idaho

LEONA K. SVANCARA¹, ROBBYN J.F. ABBITT¹, GINA M. MINSHALL¹, R. GERRY WRIGHT²

1 Landscape Dynamics Lab, Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Moscow

2 USGS, Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Moscow

At the National GAP meeting in San Antonio, TX, there was much discussion about the usefulness of GAP data outside original statewide analyses. We feel one valuable application of the data and
methodology is local conservation planning and are developing a county-level conservation plan for Latah County, Idaho. Located in the southern portion of Idaho’s panhandle, the majority of Latah County is encompassed by the Palouse bioregion, a landscape once dominated by the Palouse Prairie. In the past century this landscape has been transformed into a wheat and legume agriculture complex. Latah County, however, is unique in that it contains the transitional area between this prairie landscape and the forested landscapes that dominate the panhandle to the east.

In recent years the Latah County government and Palouse Land Trust (PLT) have become
increasingly interested in taking steps to conserve open space and natural landscapes within the
county. Working on behalf of the PLT, we have developed a system of criteria for identifying
conservation opportunity areas in Latah County. By concentrating on lands considered most at
risk of development, we identified areas in which encouraging stewardship would have the most
benefit. Our study area consisted of privately owned lands (status 4), covered approximately
two-thirds of the county, and contained a mixture of forest, shrub, agriculture, and urban
landscapes. Understanding that little would be added to a conservation network from urban and
intensively farmed agriculture lands, we removed these areas. In future analyses we plan to
include agricultural lands contributing to wildlife habitat within the county, specifically those
lands in the Natural Resource Conservation Service’s Conservation Reserve Program. However,
a complete coverage of these lands is not currently available.

We included lands containing cover types suggested to be underrepresented in statewide
protection areas (i.e., those with <10% located in status 1 and 2 lands; Idaho Gap Analysis).
However, since 10% is an arbitrary figure and may not represent adequate protection, we also
considered all potentially at-risk cover types, regardless of statewide protection status. We
identified these areas as containing important habitat features and combined them into
contiguous regions (Figure 1). The resulting coverage will be used to prioritize areas that have
the potential to either provide large areas of natural habitat or act as corridors between these
areas.

Our efforts with this project are ongoing. We are currently working on scenarios for wetlands
and riparian areas and incorporating wildlife species richness, species diversity, and sensitive species locations. We feel the methods we are using for this northern Idaho county can easily be
replicated elsewhere and provide local land trusts and county governments with the tools
necessary to identify and prioritize key areas for conservation.

Figure 1. Areas of unprotected shrub, forest, and underrepresented cover types in Latah
County, Idaho.