Our Partners
Chesapeake WILD and the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership
The Chesapeake WILD program seeks to restore and conserve a network of natural areas, corridors, and waterways on public and private lands to support thriving populations of native wildlife, migratory birds, fish, and plants, and to contribute to the social health and economic vitality of the communities in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
The first step in creating the program is bringing together watershed partners invested in conservation to develop a structure and model for jointoperations. We are taking this step in cooperation with the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership (CCP), a well-established network that will inform our process for developing shared priorities and strategies for the Chesapeake WILD program.
Because of its unique structure and governance, and the diverse crosssection of partners and stakeholders it represents, the CCP is an ideal forum for convening and engaging the agencies and organizations USFWS has been directed to consult in developing the Chesapeake WILD program.
The Chesapeake Bay Program and the Evolution of the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Chesapeake Bay Program (Bay Program) is a unique regional partnership that has led and directed the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay since 1983. In 2009, building on the early efforts of the Chesapeake Bay Program, Executive Order 13508 Chesapeake Bay Protection and Restoration called for greater federal leadership in the Chesapeake Bay effort. The resulting “Strategy for Protecting and Restoring the Chesapeake Bay Watershed” (2010) was later aligned with the Chesapeake Bay Program partnership’s goals and outcomes through the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, which calls for protecting an additional two million acres and adding 300 public access sites by 2025.
The CCP initially emerged to lead efforts to achieve goals for land conservation and public access and has since broadened its focus to include additional conservation and restoration priorities and to prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) considerations. The CCP now represents a coalition that includes the USFWS, Chesapeake Bay Program, other federal agencies, natural resource agencies from the six watershed states, and the District of Columbia, and more than 50 organizations and agencies engaged in land conservation, habitat restoration, outdoor recreation access, and related work.
Science to Support Collaboration
The CCP worked with experts from across the region for more than two years, incorporating science and decision-support tools from Nature’s Network, Landscope Chesapeake, and several other sources, to create the Chesapeake Conservation Atlas (Atlas). It maps existing resources related to long-term conservation goals for farms, forests, habitat, heritage, and human health.
The Atlas provides an excellent starting point to identify and develop shared biological, ecological, and societal outcomes that reflect current and potential restored and conserved conditions of the natural lands, waters, and resources as called for in the Act. It reflects partners’ priorities identified through a conservation-design process that integrated information, maps, and tools to refine goals and measurable objectives. It will serve as a foundation to further refine and periodically refresh the conservation design process and key products that arise from it, with a focus on elements needed to fulfill the provisions of Chesapeake WILD, supporting a science-based, watershed-wide operations plan to guide future decisions and investments.
Strategic Habitat Conservation (SHC), an approach used by USFWS, as well as many states and partners, informed USFWS input to the Atlas. SHC is a science-based adaptive management framework that guides decisions about where and how to expend resources to achieve key conservation outcomes in identified priority areas or regions of biological importance, in this case the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
The USFWS has already applied SHC successfully at locations within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, consistent with priorities reflected in the Atlas. On the Delmarva Peninsula, the USFWS leads the Delmarva Restoration and Conservation Network, a group of partners working to restore and conserve Delmarva’s landscapes. A similar partnership led by the USFWS, the Upper Susquehanna Conservation Alliance, operates on the Upper Susquehanna River in New York.
The Chesapeake WILD program, through engagement with the CCP and an enhanced conservation-design process, will apply SHC principles and provide a forum for organizations to collaborate and prioritize science needs and conservation activities, and align them within a watershed-wide strategy and operations plan to guide conservation and restoration efforts. The enhanced conservation design process, and the science-based products that result from it, will inform partners about where and how to align various conservation actions, including ecological restoration, habitat management, and landowner and community engagement, to achieve shared goals and objectives.
The program’s operations plan will provide a mechanism grounded in science to guide collective conservation action at the scale of the entire watershed, but also locally and at intermediate scales, such as those exemplified by the Delmarva and Upper Susquehanna partner networks. In this way, Chesapeake WILD will support a growing network of organic, voluntary conservation partnerships guided by the Atlas and associated spatial plans that identify important places for conservation and restoration across the watershed.
Each organization and partnership — and the growing conservation partnership network they are part of — will therefore have access to shared science and mutually conceived strategies and operational priorities to align efforts, leverage resources, and guide collaboration. The organizations, partnerships, and network will achieve greater outcomes working together than organizations working individually. The result will be measurable gains for fish and wildlife conservation, clean water, access to outdoor recreation, and other natural and economic benefits for people in the watershed, now and in the future.