Since 2001 approximately $700,000 per year has been awarded to Utah by the federal State Wildlife Grants (SWG) Program. These SWG dollars are currently matched on a 1:1 basis with state Species Protection Account (SPA) dollars, which together with SWG and diverse leveraged funds, are used throughout the state to manage species of concern and their habitats. In 2003 Congress required every state and territory to generate a 10-year Wildlife Action Plan in order to continue receipt of SWG funds, before October 2005. The second-edition, 2015 WAP was submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in August 2015, and approved in July 2016. The 2015 WAP is subject to amendment under guidance provided by FWS in 2017. This project provides the dedicated link between diverse UDWR elements and partners. Tasks include: * Obtain rare Utah animal species locality data from multiple sources, including UDWR biologists, federal agencies, museums, non-profit organizations, researchers, and others. * Quality control, standardize, and integrate all rare animal species locality data into the UDWR biodiversity database within one year of the date it is collected. * Provide precise sensitive species locality data to UDWR personnel and cooperating government agencies as necessary for planning, management, research, development, and other needs. * Provide masked sensitive species locality information to the public upon request and via the UDWR's web site. * Produce species distributions to address data gaps identified by the WAP 2015-2025. The purpose of Utah's 2015 Wildlife Action Plan is to manage native wildlife species and their habitats, sufficient to prevent the need for additional listings under the Endangered Species Act. This project will result in more strategic and coordinated conservation actions, ensuring long-term benefits for species of greatest conservation need and the habitats that support them.

The long-term goal of this project is to focus and coordinate efforts by UDWR and stakeholders to prevent ESA listings through direct and indirect actions, included on-the-ground and administrative threat abatement, as well as status assessment and monitoring. The annual goal of this project July 1, 2025 - July 1, 2026 is to lead UDWR, partners, and stakeholders to develop and effect the infrastructure and workflow changes required to establish joint implementation and monitoring norms for the remaining fraction of the 2015-2025 planning period. The 2015 WAP, as amended, reflects updated conservation priorities, as well as remaining uncertainties and emergent threats, within a coherent planning framework of data, actions, assessment, and adaptation. Project objectives include: * The UDWR WAP Implementation Team meets fairly regularly and effectively, to facilitate the translation of the WAP into annual work tasks. UDWR work plans are coordinated among DWR sections through the UDWR Wildlife Action Plan Implementation Team (WAPIT). * SPA and Utah's Watershed Restoration Initiative (WRI) have incorporated explicit priority threat & data gap abatement for current WAP SGCNs and key habitats, into their funding proposal databases. * The conservation needs of priority unlisted species are considered in local, state, and federal resource management plans and implementation activities.

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This project forms the foundation of UDWR's efforts to implement the 2015 Wildlife Action Plan. Without it, most - perhaps all - of the other WAP implementation efforts such as those of the Watershed Restoration Initiative as well as those of the partners listed below, would wither and perhaps cease in short order. Those other efforts now contribute more direct and in-kind funding to WAP implementation than SPA and State Wildlife Grants combined.

Many habitats for SGCNs identified in the Utah WAP require a natural fire regime.

Many SGCNs identified in the Utah WAP require good water quality and quantity.

The Utah Natural Heritage Program is the repository of, and the portal for requesting, sensitive species point occurrence data. It manages Government Records Access and Management Act compliance for these data in relations between state agencies as well as with academia, industry, and the public. UNHP helps other UDWR programs comply with GRAMA by processing external requests for sensitive species data.

Conservation actions for SGCN species and key habitats that will be accomplished under this proposal can roughly be categorized as on-the-ground work, impact analysis, inventory/monitoring, research, education, data management, coordination, and planning. Selected, but by no means exhaustive, examples of work expected this year follow: - Impact analysis: Work with UDWR biologists, federal land managers, and others to recognize and make recommendations to avoid/minimize/mitigate impacts to wildlife from development proposals; help create distribution and/or habitat maps for species for use in the impact analysis process; review various permit requests; respond to any ESA listing petitions. - Inventory/monitoring: Work to identify species' occurrences, population status, and response to threats and management actions; design, analyze, synthesize, and supervise field projects. - Research: Address questions vital to management. We have internal projects, we work with local and distant universities, and we participate in regional- or national-scale efforts. - Education/outreach/dissemination: Citizen science efforts, public lectures, and field experiences; bird and nature festivals; manuscript preparation for peer-reviewed scientific journals; social media posts. Serve as the regional experts for all nongame-related questions and media requests. - Data management, coordination, and planning: WAP implementation coordination and planning; Species Status Assessment (SSA) data submission, participation, and review; Conservation Action Planning (CAP) for species and areas; UDWR strategic plan; coordination and communication with federal land management biologists; participation in many initiatives, teams, and working groups including WRI, candidate species working groups, species-specific recovery teams, etc; discovering, creating, entering, proofing, approving, and sharing species and habitat data. For many of the listed activities, we seek additional funding through SPA and other state, federal, and private sources. Those funds are generally for seasonal field costs such as technicians, vehicles, supplies and materials, and other implementation costs. However, without this essential grant, we would lack the capacity to carry out most, if not all, of the duties of the Native Aquatic and Terrestrial Wildlife Conservation Programs

Species monitoring -- whether annual, periodic, or occasional -- is a key ongoing activity of this proposal. Information on SGCN population status, and response to conservation actions, is vital to guide management and inform Species Status Assessments. Methods and timelines vary by species. All results will however be incorporated into periodic status and threat assessments for all SGCNs, which will constitute the cumulative monitoring for all SGCNs statewide, as well as provide some indication of program effectiveness.

An extraordinarily diverse set of partners work with the employees funded by this project. Among the federal partners are: NPS, USFWS, BLM, USFS, NRCS, USACE, and DoD. Among the state partners are DEQ, UDAF, UDOT, and several of the sister divisions within the DNR, most notably UGS. Besides executive-branch agencies, there are various universities (BYU, USU, UofU, UVU, SUU, etc) and a plethora of NGOs such as -- but not limited to -- Trout Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, HawkWatch International, Hogle Zoo, and Tracey Aviary.

The most important next step is to secure reliable long-term funding for the positions and activities sustained by this project. Completing that step will liberate $1,000,000+ of SPA money annually for other projects, as well as remove a constant source of strain and friction on individual staff and relationships. Barring secure funding, the long-term success and stability of this project will be in perpetual suspense.

Appropriate implementation of the Utah WAP will maintain healthy wildlife populations on the landscape while allowing sustainable uses of natural resources in most cases.