Strength in Numbers: The Power of Collaborative Conservation in Alaska and Canada | Article

From 2010 to 2017, there was a Department of the Interior-led conservation network that covered most of North America called the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs). It was the first federal, nationwide effort to create a coordinated, landscape-level approach to conservation.
Though the LCCs no longer exist, a few have persisted by operating through nonprofits, such as the Northern Latitudes Partnerships in Alaska and Canada, which bring togethers agencies, Tribes, First Nations, academics, nonprofits, and individuals.
The Biden-Harris Administration has signaled support for future collaborative conservation work through exective orders and initiatives.

For the past decade, Crystal Leonetti, the Alaska Native liaison for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), has been leading a basic training course on Alaska Native relations for federal agency staff. But she was eager to take that learning further.

“We wanted to get more in-depth in the philosophy of how these two very different knowledge systems—science and Indigenous traditional knowledge—can work together side by side,” Leonetti explained, “as well as how Indigenous peoples’ methods for stewardship can lead conservation on federal or state landscapes.”

Support from FWS, Alaska Pacific University, the Alaska Conservation Foundation, and a group of three regional networks called the Northern Latitudes Partnershi p s turned Leonetti’s idea into a reality. Over 11 weeks in the fall of 2021, about 30 attendees from federal and state agencies, nonprofits, and academia learned from primarily Indigenous leaders about colonization, Indigenous philosophy, and stewardship, and how to apply this knowledge in their own work.

The group has continued to stay in touch, sharing updates about their projects and other developments. “It created something longer lasting than even I anticipated,” Leonetti said.

Heavily focused on community building and Indigenous teaching, this course exemplifies how the Northern Latitudes Partnerships is bolstering regional conservation work through trust and collaboration. This network of agencies, Tribes, First Nations, nonprofits, and individuals formed in 2017 from the Alaska and Northwestern Canada remnants of a seven-year Department of the Interior program called the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives.

Map of the three initiatives in Alaska and Canada that are working under the Northern Latitudes Partnerships. Image Credit: Northern Latitudes Partnerships

Now hosted by the non-profit Alaska Conservation Foundation with backing from public and private funders, the Northern Latitudes Partnerships serve as a homebase that partners in Alaska and Canada can connect to and further grow regional programs, benefiting everyone within the network. It is a model for large-scale conservation that, with federal support, could be replicated to reinvigorate the nationwide conservation effort, helping people and ecosystems adapt to a changing climate.

History of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives

One of the biggest threats to nature worldwide is the climate crisis, which is forcing species extinctions and migrations, reducing natural storm and wildfire buffers, and harming processes that provide us with clean air and water. Counteracting these dangers is challenging because species and ecosystems rarely follow political or cultural borders, whether that is between countries, states, or groups of people. For species like the monarch butterfly that migrates throughout North America or ecosystems like the Great Plains that span 10 states, protection requires thinking large-scale.

The impact of climate change on ecosystems was front-of-mind when the Department of the Interior created the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) in 2009. It was the first federal, nationwide effort to create a coordinated and landscape-level approach to conservation and was critical in getting people and agencies to think about conservation in a collaborative way. Beginning in 2010, the FWS began to provide significant funding and personnel support for 22 LCCs, which covered the entire nation as well as portions of Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

Each LCC was responsible for researching and monitoring large-scale environmental threats in its region, including climate change. The early climate adaptation work was about “putting the pieces together,” as Greg Wathen, who was the Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks LCC coordinator from 2010 to 2017, described it. He and other coordinators would meet regularly to share their best practices and research.

View larger map

Map of the LCC Network

Five years in, Congress directed that the National Academy of Sciences write a report on the LCC network to determine the program’s effectiveness and if it was needed. That 2016 report found that LCCs addressed a critical need to take a landscape approach to conservation and that no other program was positioned to coordinate natural and cultural resource management efforts at the national scale.

Despite that conclusion, and even though Congress funded the LCCs for another year, in 2017, the Trump Administration withdrew support for the LCCs, including FWS funding and personnel. Most of the LCCs were forced to disband immediately. “If you don’t have staff support,” Wathen explained, “you don’t have anything.”

Some were able to survive: in addition to the three Alaska LCCs that formed the Northern Latitudes Partnerships, FWS personnel from five LCCs in the Southeast joined the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy, and a few vestiges of others remained in the Pacific Northwest and California. But the connected national network of LCCs was lost, and Wathen thinks that large conservation programs have paid a price.

“If we had had an ongoing LCC network through these last four to five years, there is no doubt in my mind that we would be a whole lot further ahead with landscape-scale and climate-resilient conservation projects.”

Keeping Collaborative Conservation Alive in Alaska

Back in Alaska, the Northern Latitudes Partnerships have been able to persist despite the loss of the LCC network largely because they are hosted by a non-governmental organization, allowing them to operate using a greater diversity of public and private funding sources.

One of the groups that has benefitted from being a part of the Partnerships is the Indigenous Sentinels Network, a tribally-created program that provides Indigenous communities with tools and training for environmental and climate monitoring.

Community led stewardship efforts supported by the Northern Latitudes Partnerships and the Indigenous Sentinels Network in Southeast Alaska. Photo Credit: Northern Latitudes Partnerships

“The sheer networking and recognition that we have been able to gain has launched us into a new realm of operations,” Lauren Divine, director of the Ecosystem Conservation Office for the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, said. St. Paul Island is located off the coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea and is the headquarters for the Indigenous Sentinels Network.

Last year, with the support of Northern Latitudes, the Indigenous Sentinels Network was able to launch a new pilot program called Skipper Science, which provides data-collecting tools for people working in the fishing industry. The new app will allow people in the fishing industry, whether for commercial, recreational, or subsistence purposes, to monitor environmental and climate trends.

“We had been trying to get this program off the ground for the past five years,” Divine explained. “Having access to these broader networks across the state and beyond internationally has helped us do a lot more work than the small group of us could.”

In addition to helping the Indigenous Sentinels Network expand its work, the Northern Latitudes Partnerships also help facilitate conversations between transboundary partner organizations. Recently, they have helped form a set of working groups, funded by a $250,000 National Science Foundation grant, that cover topics such as data sovereignty and decolonizing research from the perspectives of participants in Alaska and three Canadian provinces. These discussions could lead to new standards of data collection for better information sharing without sacrificing Indigenous ways of seeing the world.

The Future of Large Landscape Conservation

While it is unlikely that the LCC network will be reinstated in its former configuration, there is still interest in providing federal support for large landscape conservation efforts and partnerships nationwide. FWS remains a funder of the Northern Latitudes Partnerships and other similar programs around the nation. In President Biden’s Executive Order Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, a highlight was the 30x30 goal, or conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030. The order also gave rise to the “America the Beautiful” initiative, which listed expanding collaborative conservation as one of six key priority areas.

However, there has yet to be clear guidance on how the Biden-Harris Administration plans to reach that goal. “There are pieces and parts that are already out there,” Wathen said, referring to existing collaborations and other long-standing programs like the Migratory Bird Joint Ventures and the National Fish Habitat Partnership. But, he said, what is still missing is the national network piece, which would provide a support system and mission that all the regional partnerships could work towards, allowing them to achieve more successes than any one entity could alone.

In Alaska, the Northern Latitudes Partnerships are already providing that framework for people and organizations to work under. It is a “net,” as Leonetti described it. “They catch everybody and bring us together.”

Finding a way to stretch this net across the country, connecting existing networks and creating new ones, will require investing long-term in relationship building and funding. But the Northern Latitudes Partnerships shows that this work is possible. With continued support from all sectors and levels of government, it could also be the catalyst for more holistic conservation efforts to help address the massive scale of the climate and biodiversity crises in an equitable way.

“We found such power in coming together,” Divine said, “Because we are all so passionate about working towards a common goal.”

Author: Emma Johnson