98th ESA Annual Meeting (August 4 -- 9, 2013)

August 03 - 09, 2013

OPS 1

Collaborative Natural Resource Management on Military Lands: Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska

Natural resources management on military lands is important given that with roughly 30 million acres under its control, Department of Defense (DoD) is the fifth largest land manager in the U.S. The 74,297-acre Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER) is located within the Municipality of Anchorage in south-central Alaska. Management of natural resources has evolved from single-species with little consideration of habitat to adaptive ecosystem management and regional collaboration. Under the philosophy of adaptive ecosystem management, the focus at JBER is to maintain or restore native ecosystem types across their natural range, including the suite of plants and animals that inhabit them in a healthy, functioning state. This landscape level ecological approach blends the needs of military mission with the health of the environment to ensure JBER ecosystems are diverse, productive, and economically sustainable. Management of natural resources on military lands is truly collaborative and includes state and federal agency cooperators, as well as universities and private enterprise. This poster session will highlight DoD-wide initiatives, and cover the entirety of natural resources management at JBER. Posters will include: Poster 1. Natural resource management for military mission support - this poster will provide a description of current efforts and program areas throughout DoD, including bird-aircraft strike hazard avoidance technologies and the update of an installation-wide wetland survey at JBER. Poster 2. Land cover change at JBER: Learning from the past and shaping the future - this will cover work to categorize land cover change in an effort to describe habitat change and inform future land use recommendations. Poster 3. Regional collaboration in wildlife monitoring and management - many wildlife studies have been conducted (and are in progress) on military lands; this poster will present highlights of DoD wildlife projects and describe JBER work in detail. Poster 4. Cook Inlet beluga whale and the management of anadromous systems - significant effort has been devoted to gathering information on this federally-listed endangered species and the primary constituent elements of its diet. Poster 5. Collaborative management of vegetation on withdrawn lands - roughly 15 million acres of land managed by DoD has been withdrawn from other federal agencies. The Bureau of Land Management owns the majority of the land that JBER occupies; management history, monitoring results, and future directions for forest and wildland fire management will be discussed.