Military bases can face 20 overlapping species plans, and Virginia Tech wants one fix

Large stretches of natural habitat can exist within military installations, making wildlife protection more complicated than it might seem.

Virginia Tech said two of its researchers have each been awarded $2 million grants to improve how threatened and endangered species are managed on those lands.

Rather than writing a separate recovery plan for every species that shares a landscape, the researchers want to manage the ecosystem as a whole.

What happened?

The new efforts are being led by Associate Professor Haldre Rogers and Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hunter, both in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation.

The research is supported by the Defense Department's Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program and is meant to address a recurring problem on military lands: conservation planning becomes difficult to scale when many species are involved.

Military bases can contain habitats used by multiple protected species at once, and each species may carry its own recovery obligations.

As a result, land managers may end up implementing several separate plans in the same area at the same time.

Rogers summed up the issue this way: "You might have 20 different plans all overlapping in the same place. You have to do 20 different management actions and 20 different monitoring surveys — as more species get listed, this approach breaks down."

In southeastern Georgia, Hunter's team is studying fire-managed ecosystems where prescribed burning is already a key part of land management.

Her group plans to collect data on "birds, bats, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, insects, pollinators — every species that we can, every animal species" and use it to evaluate which burning strategies could help the largest number of species at once, instead of designing those burns around only a few.

Why does it matter?

Because access is limited and the land is actively managed, military bases often preserve important wildlife habitat.

If researchers can simplify how those landscapes are managed for conservation, the same strategy could be used elsewhere where overlapping recovery plans slow progress.

Healthier ecosystems can help support cleaner water, stronger biodiversity, and more resilient forests.

A more coordinated approach to conservation could also reduce wasted time and money by cutting down on duplicate surveys and management actions that may conflict with one another.

Rogers' project, based in the Mariana Islands, will test whether habitat-based planning can outperform single-species management under the Endangered Species Act.

Her team plans to rely on ecosystem hypergraphs — a way to map species interactions, habitat connectivity, and life histories — to identify sets of species that could be protected together rather than individually.

What are people saying?

Hunter said previous approaches have often been too limited in scope: "In the past, it's really been a focus on a couple of key species, like red-cockaded woodpeckers."

She added, "Then we put it all together to figure out, 'If we burn in this way, in this area, can we improve the outlook for many species at the same time?'"

Rogers emphasized a similar goal, saying researchers are trying to find "a way of managing and monitoring the whole ecosystem" and to ensure "an action that helps one species isn't actually hurting another."

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