PEAK PUTTERS

Western Governors making progress protecting habitat and linkage zones
By Bethanie Walder

October 7, 2009

I spent the last two days at the Western Governor’s Association (WGA) Wildlife Council (WGWC) meeting in Helena. The meeting focused on progress toward implementing a resolution for improving wildlife connectivity and linkage zones across the western states.

Back in 2007, the WGA adopted a resolution encouraging states to protect wildlife linkage zones and crucial wildlife habitat in the west. The meeting this week highlighted two key things:

•a draft white paper that provides crucial wildlife habitat and decision support system guidelines, and
•a new Decision Support System (DSS) developed by the state of Montana for protecting key habitat and corridors.
The draft white paper defines crucial habitats as:

Places containing the resources, incuding food, water, cover, shelter and ‘important wildlife corridors,’ that contribute to survival and reproduction of aquatic and terrestrial wildlife and are necessary to prevent unacceptable declines, or facilitate future recovery of wildlife populations, or are important ecological systems with high biological diversity value.

It defines “important wildlife corridorsâ€

This is probably one of the most polite ways of saying that they are going to restrict ORV's in the wilderness. Anywhere you go roads in the mountains are dirt....dirt roads run-off when it rains and goes into the streams and affects aquatic habitat. This snowball is getting bigger than all of us

I have a solution for the aquatic habitat part....pave all the mountain roads!!!!