ROCK SPRINGS - All too often, project proposals to enhance wildlife habitat are slow to fruition because of bureaucratic red-tape and other paper impediments.

A new, ambitious initiative to restore and protect wildlife habitat in southwest Wyoming aims to get those projects on the ground a lot faster.

The recently-unveiled Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative will rely on the expertise of a host of participating state and federal agencies to ensure the most-needed habitat conservation and enhancement projects achieve tangible, on-the-ground results, officials involved in the effort said.

The initiative partners envision those projects could include riparian work, prescribed fire treatments, wildlife friendly fencing, weed control, mechanical treatments such as chaining, raptor nest construction, and the purchase of conservation easements, among others.

"Hopefully, the initiative will help us do these on-the-ground (habitat) projects in a much more efficient and productive way," Wyoming Game and Fish Deputy Director John Emmerich told a small crowd of Rock Springs residents during a meeting recently.

"We want to build the capacity within these existing organizations to try and knock down those barriers that are out there," Emmerich said.

"The initiative will be the vehicle to handle those projects and dollars … it will be focused unit that aims to improve efficiency and get more work actually on the ground."

Wyoming is the main focus of the Bush administration's proposed $22 million Healthy Lands Initiative which aims to conserve wildlife resources and to facilitate responsible energy development across eight Western states.

More than half the money, about $11.5 million, will be directed primarily to the Green River Basin in southwest Wyoming, where intense natural gas development in the Jonah and Pinedale Anticline fields is affecting the habitat of sage grouse, deer, elk, moose, antelope and other species.

Congress still has to approve the appropriation, however.

The initiative would help reclaim land affected by natural gas development and study how development is affecting wildlife and habitat in the basin, which encompasses about 15 million acres.

Landscape scale

Southwest Wyoming encompasses some of the highest-quality wildlife habitats and world-class wildlife in the West, Emmerich said.

The region's vast open spaces also support an important livestock industry, key wildlife corridors, vital big game winter and summer range, and some of the country's most sought-after recreational opportunities.

At the same time, southwest Wyoming is a lucrative, active source of natural gas, with an estimated 83 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas in the Jonah and Pinedale Anticline fields.

"There's a lot of major changes occurring in southwest Wyoming at a very accelerated rate … which is bringing impacts to all facets of public lands," Emmerich said. "We felt it was important to get ahead of these things and to be proactive on a landscape scale."

"We wanted to try on a larger scale to restore and maintain habitat and conserve this world-class wildlife resource … to utilize all the tools out there in as cost-effective way as possible so we can deliver projects on the ground with much better efficiency," he said.

"This has to be a landscape scale effort if it's really going to benefit wildlife. And it has to be a long-term effort. It could be 30 years before we start seeing the real benefits."

Emmerich said although impact mitigation and reclamation is required in energy development areas such as the Jonah field, a larger, landscape-scope of conservation action will be much more beneficial.

He said the initiative will enhance rather than replace existing requirements for energy development reclamation and mitigation. It will also compliment other, ongoing industry efforts to improve off-site wildlife habitat such as the Jonah Interagency Office in Pinedale.

Rock Springs office

The initiative plan is to focus conservation efforts on habitat areas outside of areas where oil and gas development is currently occurring.

"It doesn't make sense to put monies into areas of intense development like the Jonah field," Emmerich said. "We want to identify those areas in southwest Wyoming where there hasn't been much impact from traditional development and then use those areas as places we can go to do habitat work to offset (habitat lost) to development."

The first step will be to develop and overlay maps showing areas of wildlife habitat, current oil and gas development, livestock grazing allotments and other pertinent data.

"This will give us a much better picture of what we're dealing with and provide direction for the work," he said.

Work on the initiative will be conducted from an office located at the Bureau of Land Management's field office in Rock Springs.

Emmerich said the office will act as a "central clearinghouse" of information. "It will bring all the information into one location so it can be accessible to anyone who wants it," he said.

Emmerich estimated actual project work could begin as early as the spring of 2008.

Wyoming Department of Agriculture spokesman Jason Fearneyhough noted the area includes approximately 1,400 family farms and ranches, and is home to about 120,000 cattle and roughly 95,000 sheep.

"We're very concerned about impacts to those, but we also recognize that work done to enhance habitat for wildlife also enhances habitat for livestock," he said. "Hopefully, (the initiative) will be a very valuable vehicle to get some of these projects on the ground done."

Southwest Wyoming Bureau reporter Jeff Gearino can be reached at (307) 875-5359 or at gearino@tribcsp.com.