The Utah Natural Heritage Program, which is part of the Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) built and maintains an Environmental Review Tool (ERT) that allows external users to identify an area of interest and generate a report of animals and plants of concern within a two-mile buffer of the area of interest. The ERT has served DWR well, but management and users have requested additional information to be available in the reports and additional features in the system. DWR would like to: *Expand the existing tool to include robust impact and GIS analysis tools *Streamline reports to expedite environmental review processes *Support resource decision-making by improving the availability of heritage localities, migration corridor data, wildlife habitat layers, and other supporting natural resource datasets.

Current workflows require natural resource professionals to use many tools to look for wildlife information. Building this analysis tool will improve customer service and consistency by providing a one-stop shop for authoritative wildlife datasets. The Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) needs to advance the administration of wildlife data, especially rare species records, to promote wildlife conservation across the state. These critical datasets include game species habitat layers, conservation species locations, and migration corridors. The current tool is dependent on occurrence points that insufficiently represent true species distributions. Though consultants and partners use this information, it lacks an actionable environmental context for wildlife decision-making. We plan to add species habitats and migration corridors to the RATool, making wildlife management data available to all project planners. Accessible data will then aid in conserving crucial habitats and migration corridors. Building a robust geographic analysis tool would promote improved wildlife planning efforts. This tool will inform management actions, avoid species listing under the Endangered Species Act, and maintain wildlife migration corridors.

This tool will allow resource specialists, industry, and others to identify early during project development wildlife and their habitats. This tool will communicate best management practices for species identified within spatial locations identified by the user. See the attachment for a sample report.

Examples of Management Plans that will leverage RADD Tool include: Utah Wildlife Action Plan Utah Statewide Elk Management Plan Utah Beaver Management Plan Utah Bighorn Sheep Statewide Management Plan Utah Wild Turkey Management Plan Utah Mule Deer Statewide Management Plan Utah Upland Game Management Plan Utah Conservation Plan for Greater Sage-grouse

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This tool will help industry and resource professionals ensure that wildlife and their habitat are not negatively impacts by project related activities. The understanding of wildlife resources in project areas will provide the opportunity to avoid, minimize and/or mitigate early in the planning process.

Contract with a firm that can help achieve the following: Identify project stakeholders and coordinate resources Establish points of contact Establish the mechanics of project communication, reporting, collaboration, risk management, and change management Establish status meeting cadence Review and verify the scope of work and project approach Review project risks and risk mitigation strategies Review and finalize task assignments

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The DWR has solicited feedback from Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining, Utah Division of Transportation, environmental consulting firms, and ESMF advisory council. This tool could be applicable to state and federal government agencies, oil and gas industry, mining industry, water users, developers, solar industry, wind developers and numerous other sectors.

The creation of user friendly RADD tool will allow DWR, industry, and partners to conduct management work to help prevent species of concern from being federally listed as threatened or endangered, and work to delist those species that are currently listed.

This tool will provide timely information for industry and other project proponent on wildlife resources in Utah. Increasing knowledge of crucial fish and wildlife habitats and migration patterns. Providing industry the ability to decrease risk to species and their habitats through integrated implementation of the Wildlife Action Plan, species recovery plans, conservation agreements and other management plans with the use of RADD Tool.

01/29/2024

07/30/2024

2025

The DWR has contracted with Egen, who has helped develop the Wildlife Tracker tool to build the Wildlife Habitat Analysis Tool (WHAT). The tool provides internal and external users with a one-stop shop to understand wildlife habitats in user-identified areas. Egen was the lowest bid and provided many of the same functions as Wildlife Tracker. This will help internal and external users quickly understand how to use this tool to optimize functionality.

The Utah Natural Heritage Program, which is part of the Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) built and maintains an Environmental Review Tool (ERT) that allows external users to identify an area of interest and generate a report of animals and plants of concern within a two-mile buffer of the area of interest. The ERT has served DWR well, but management and users have requested additional information in the reports and additional features in the system. The DWR has added the following functionality and named the tool Wildlife Habitat Analysis Tool (WHAT). *Expanded the existing tool to include robust impact and GIS analysis tools *Streamline reports and added mitigation recommendations to expedite environmental review processes *Support resource decision-making by improving the availability of heritage localities, migration corridor data, wildlife habitat layers, and other supporting natural resource datasets.

The DWR is working on version 2 of the Wildlife Habitat Analysis Tool (WHAT). Version 2 will create pipelines for other DWR information like BatBase and RaptorBase to be used by the WHAT tool and provide users with the most current information.