 Hello and good morning on a chilly Tuesday in the nation's capital. I hope everyone is having a nice day so far. Thank you for joining us today for our briefing, building a durable national framework for large landscape conservation. I'm Dan Bresset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics for policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program that provides technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. EESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics in briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts are always available for free online at www.esi.org. The best way to stay informed about our latest educational resources is to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Today, we conclude our four-part series about existing federal programs that deliver multiple climate benefits. We started way back on February 8th, when we took a look at the Rural Energy Savings Program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Next, we convened a panel to discuss energy efficiency programs at the U.S. Department of Energy, February 24th. When last we convened, it was March 18th and the topic was Climate Adaptation Programs. Yesterday, the Biden-Harris administration released the FY23 budget proposal. Lots of good stuff and the timing between the budget and this briefing series about federal programs, well, we're not talking about a coincidence. We applaud the administration's renewed commitment to these programs. There's no shortage of work being done across the federal government to address climate change, and we need a new generation of climate policies to meet our commitments under the Paris Agreement, but we should not lose sight of the important efforts already underway, and that is what our briefing series has been all about. As we reach the end of our series, we can watch the briefing recordings and view the highlight notes by visiting us online at www.esi.org forward slash briefings. I always talk up our bi-weekly newsletter because it is a great compendium of resources about climate change solutions, which also happens to be its name. Our last issue from two weeks ago was all about land management and conservation, and it contained a multitude of additional written resources like an article about collaborative conservation in Alaska, a Q&A with the director of the Nevada Department of Wildlife, and an overview of a recent Senate committee on energy and natural resources subcommittee on national parks hearing about the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and the National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Restoration Fund. So I could not be more eager to keep learning today from our panelists about large landscape conservation. The need for coordination between county, state, tribal, and national borders is so essential to climate change solutions across the board. Our panel today features representatives from government, the non-profit sector, and philanthropy who will describe how this coordination and multi-sector mobilization of key expertise and competencies adds up to more than the sum of its many parts and helps advance a much needed inclusive and durable national framework for landscape conservation. It's a good example of what needs to be done, as well as a great example of how climate mitigation adaptation can best be done. Let me remind everyone that we will have some time for questions today, and we'll do our best to incorporate questions from our audience. If you have a question, you can send it to us via email at askask.org, or even better, you can follow us on Twitter at EESI Online and send it to us that way. Before I turn to our panel, I would like to introduce Lynn Scarlett, who will help us get started and understand the issues at stake. Lynn recently retired from her position as the Global Chief External Affairs Officer at the Nature Conservancy. In this role, she served on the global executive team overseeing and influencing climate and conservation policy in the United States and across 79 countries and territories. Prior to that, Lynn served at the US Department of the Interior from 2001 through 2009 in the George W. Bush Administration, where she was the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer of the Department. The department manages 500 million acres of US public lands and she also served as Acting Secretary of the Interior in 2006. More recently, Lynn shared the Science Advisory Board of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2014 to 2019, and served on the US National Academy of Sciences, sorry, US National Academy of Sciences Sustainability Roundtable. She's currently a coordinating committee member for the Network for Landscape Conservation. Let us welcome Lynn into our briefing today. Welcome, everyone. As we contemplate lands, waters, and ocean in the United States and indeed the world around us, we see a troubling tableau. Climate change and a wide range of human activities are impacting habitats, wildlife, and people at unprecedented rates affecting lives, livelihoods, people, places, and wildlife. Our challenges transcend individual jurisdictions and properties. Consider drought, flooding, catastrophic wildland fire, seed level rise, the list goes on. Consider that for biodiversity, we need connectedness across large scales and corridors to link places and enhance species movement. We need conservation management on lands, coasts, and at sea, we need urban and rural engagement and action. In short, we need landscape scale, durable, collaborative, and inclusive conservation. We need all hands on deck. But what does this mean? It means a sustained embrace of conservation on working lands in cities and the countryside on private and public lands. And that means we need to help finance these efforts through public funds and marketplace investments. The good news is that many communities, farmers, ranchers, and others are increasingly engaged in working together to restore habitats, improve soil health, secure wildlife corridors, and much, much more. Their experiential knowledge of place helps pinpoint the possible and define the doable through the leadership of Indigenous peoples, local communities, towns, farmers, federal state, and local agencies. Through these efforts emerge the trust, respect, and shared problem solving that arise from diverse partnerships. Durable solutions require linking livelihoods and healthy landscapes. For example, healthy soils bring greater land productivity, carbon storage, better water quality, and more biodiversity. We need to invest in actionable science to inform decisions in dynamic, interconnected, and increasingly complex contexts. And we need rules and programs that support collaboration. As we all look to the future, we have an opportunity to think big, think smart, and work together. To be successful, we must deploy a full suite of conservation tools, newly protected places, conservation on working lands investment in natural infrastructure like floodplains to protect communities and enhance biodiversity. We need green infrastructure in cities and more. The good news is that collaborative large scale conservation is a centerpiece, a centerpiece of 21st century conservation. Many of these efforts are initiated within and among communities. Large scale conservation and restoration initiatives are broadening in scope, scale, and extent. We see large scale conservation in the Gulf of Mexico, Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay, the Crown of the Continent, in some marine reserves. We see other large scale restoration efforts in places like the Great Lakes, the Swan Valley and Montana, the Penobscot River in Maine, so many places, so many voices, so many caring hands across landscapes and seascapes. This collaborative focus at even bigger scales is emerging in both countryside and cities. Think about Chicago Wilderness or the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge or Houston's Greenway System. All involve looking at systems and linking cities and countryside, enterprise and environment. We need to build on those efforts and experiences. Poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, and I quote, perhaps real truth resides in a walk around the lake. Connecting with diverse communities and cities and countryside builds local knowledge of the textures and rhythms of a place. And from that connection to place springs a passion for action. Yet that's still not enough. We need funding, funding of collaborative conservation partnerships of science of protected places and their management. And we need innovative financing, things like water funds that invest in watersheds to protect urban waters. The tasks are challenging, but many building blocks are in place. Now we need to bring these building blocks and endeavors to new levels for conservation that benefits people and nature. Thank you. Well, thank you, Lynn, for joining us this morning and helping us get our briefing on the best possible foot. Lots of really great messaging in your comments today and I'm really looking forward to hearing our four panelists elaborate and share their perspectives on those very, very important topics. It is my privilege to introduce the first of our four panelists. So let me welcome Deborah Rock, Dr. Deborah Rock to our panel today. Deb is the Assistant Director for Science Applications for the US Fish and Wildlife Service where she coordinates the services science needs and works with partners on collaborative conservation. Deb firmly believes that there are opportunities for everyone as the conservation community expands its work in creating a network of connected lands and waters that support functioning ecosystems. She lives on a small working farm in Western Massachusetts. That sounds really, really nice where she enjoys, where she shows that working lands are integral to conservation and enjoys all things outdoors. Deb, good morning to you and welcome to our panel. Good morning, Dan. I'm gonna see if I can't share my screen here. How am I doing? Looks great. All right, awesome. Well, good morning and thank you. What a great lead off, Lynn. It's my pleasure to be here this morning discussing one of my favorite topics, collaborative conservation. I wanna just take a moment to thank the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, the Center for Landscape Conservation and the Network for Landscape Conservation for sponsoring this webcast and inviting me here today. Lynn mentioned a few things that I hope are gonna be themes throughout. She talked a lot about interconnectedness. She also talked about that there's a lot of great things that are happening out there, these established collaborative partnerships, but that they need a little bit of support. She also mentioned the role of public and other funds to create durable, inclusive collaborative partnerships that operate on landscape scale. And I think the underlying theme maybe for all of this is trust, she mentioned trust. Before I get started, I wanna take a moment and acknowledge all of what's going on in the world today. It certainly is a lot. And I think because it's a lot, many people don't think about all of the environmental issues and the conservation challenges on top of all that other stuff. I keep on hearing these words in my mind, a brief and rapidly closing window for a livable future and avoiding a worst case scenario requires transformational change. I'm quoting from the IPC report from February 27th. And I'm bringing this up not to add one more thing to the pile that is already a lot, but to really focus on that phrase transformational change. The transformational change, I think the kind that is needed to address our big conservation challenges really requires us obviously to do things differently, trying new things and being okay at failing. And most importantly, giving up those things that we know are not working. We've traditionally measured our conservation successes by the acre, by the species, and by level stream mile. And we have had undoubtedly some awesome and great successes. But I don't believe that this is any longer an accurate measure of our success given today's conservation challenges. So before I get down to what needs to change in regards to landscape conservation, I think it would be good for all of us to collectively understand some of the past and to hear about what's still working and then what needs to change. So I want everybody to keep in mind that although landscape conservation and creating a national framework may not appear to be transformational change to all of you, it really is to some. So let's get started in our journey for history. So about 15 years ago, a group of folks within the Fish and Wildlife Service and the conservation world had a really great idea. It was so good that it got new congressional appropriations of around $25 million a year and created a new program within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, science applications. This program was created to address complex conservation challenges using a landscape conservation approach as well as to work on and understand and mitigate climate change. But mostly this program was created to coordinate conservation efforts in a geography. We chose watersheds. So in 2009, landscape conservation cooperatives were stood up. These 22 LCCs spanned the country from Alaska to Puerto Rico and were conceived to bring conservation organizations together to work on those biggest shared priorities. It was a great idea and it's one that has persisted, but it was poorly implemented and it was poorly communicated and those 22 LCCs were not equally resourced. LCCs brought together federal agencies, state fish and wildlife agencies, conservation NGOs, both big and small, and invited tribes to tackle those big conservation issues within those watersheds. It gave everyone an equal voice and that's important. So it's also important that in this point in the story that we note that state fish and wildlife agencies, tribes, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service together share the statutory authority to manage wildlife in this country. And this is important because each one of these entities are very protective about their authority and for good reason. And it is that reason and this everybody gets a vote that the LCCs and this kind of top-down approach of the implementation by the Fish and Wildlife Service were not well received by all of our state partners. So due to the implementation, the politics, the personalities, and the geographies they're in, some LCCs had gained great traction and developed these truly collaborative priorities and resources while others were used as an example of a failed idea and federal overreach. The previous administration's president's budget did not include science applications or support for the LCCs in their budget and in 2017 LCC operations ceased and the partnerships suffered. It's also important to note the timing of this because it came pretty much on the heels of National Academy of Science review of the LCCs that concluded that the nation needs a landscape approach to conservation. So after not being included in the budget, the science program and the Fish and Wildlife Service was perilously close to ending. And what we did was we worked to reaffirm our shared management of species and habitat with the states. Some of the accomplishments that we had with the states in the last few years are that we reviewed selected landscape conservation collaboratives to identify lessons learned and to adopt this resolution on landscape conservation. AFLO, the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, then established a president's task force on shared science and landscape conservation priorities that included federal and NGO entities that together identified shared science priorities and conducted an examination of how state wildlife action plans contribute to landscape conservation. So this in the next year, which was last year, led to the work on a workgroup on those swaps and landscape conservation. And out of that was a framework for swaps and landscape conservation that had recommendations for regionalizing the swaps and using those as the underpinning of the science in these collaborative partnerships. And then it's important to note that really we all acknowledge that no one size fits all. And so we with the states and AFLO created a joint task force that will work. It's happening this year. We'll work to identify common themes among efforts so that we have some consistency across jurisdictions that enable us to highlight opportunities and collaborate on implementation. This effort's going to utilize the information in the swaps and strengthen our shared commitment to conservation while building trust through shared perspectives. We also worked hard to, we also realized that we needed very much to work earlier, better, and more often with our tribal partners. And we're working very closely with the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society. I know, we know, and Julie will reaffirm that the NAFWS does not speak for tribes, but we really value their partnership and them helping us build better communication and partnerships with tribes. The NAFWS was a sponsor, along with the Network for Landscape Conservation in the Future of Conservation Forum. We've also worked very closely with NAFWS and the states to develop a national zoonotic disease monitoring initiative. And we support AFWA in positions and we're also doing that with NAFWS to provide them some more capacity to help work on these collaborative efforts. And then the infrastructure bill that was passed several months ago has $400 million of ecosystem restoration and grants to states, tribes and territories. Continue to talk to states and tribes about how best to implement that and use that as a collaborative push to get things done on a landscape scale. All this is great, but collaborative conservation is complicated. There are so many entities out there that are doing great conservation work, but in a lot of cases, those efforts are not connected in a geography. The point is, is that there are a lot of challenges across the country that no one entity has the authority or the ability to address. It's going to take a coordinated national effort by the conservation community and the public. I believe this effort, due to the scale and the scope that's before us, is best supported by a federal entity. So what is the role of the federal government? Well, I said scale and scope. And so there needs to be coordination at multiple scales. And this coordination helps elucidate these common processes and will help provide consistency across efforts. That's really important for data and science as we look across these cross-jurisdictional scales to help us make consistent decisions and implement things in a collaborative way. I also think that the role of the federal government and maybe science apps to be specific is helping establish consistency across efforts to provide durable funding and coordination, weaving all these efforts together. All of the entities on the previous slide have stated that the hardest thing to fund, but the most important thing to success is coordination. So what is a national framework? It's really transformational. And really what it is, it's a durable approach that doesn't change with administration, whether we're talking about federal administration, state administration or local administration. We need durability, we heard that from Lynn. So what does a national framework do? Let's look for clues from a regional example. The Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy, or CECAS, came together around the bold vision of creating a network of connected lands and waters that support thriving fish and wildlife population and improves the quality of life for people across the 15 states of the Southeast. The Southeast Conservation Blueprint is a living spatial plan for that geography. CECAS and the Blueprint are almost 10 years old. It's important to remember that different partnerships prioritize different things. Remember, one size doesn't fit all. But here, the Blueprint prioritizes connectivity and ecosystem function. It identifies potential areas for range of conservation actions, such as management, economic consensus, and protection. The key to the Blueprint's success, though, is flexibility in working with others to incorporate their priorities into the Blueprint. To date, the Blueprint has had over 250 people for more than 100 organizations use and benefit from their work. They've helped drive more than $40 million in conservation funding and protect and restore over 75,000 acres. So, Science Application Program continues to transform no longer a top-down approach with predefined geographies, but we're going to bring people together around priorities in science and established partnerships. We're working hard to be inclusive and are mindful that there's a long way to go to make everyone feel welcome in the conservation community. There have been numerous studies looking at human health well-being and happiness, and yes, nature helps them. But it turns out that connectedness is critically important to human health. The same is true for ecosystems. The future depends on us working together. A national framework will drive investments and support coordination. It's the transformation we need right now. Thank you very much for this opportunity to talk with you today. I look forward to the rest of the webinar. Thank you. Thank you, Deb. That was a great presentation and a great way to kick off the rest of our panel. That brings us to our second panelist. Dr. Julie Thorsensen is the Executive Director for the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, the organization that Deb was just talking about, and a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. She grew up on a cattle ranch on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in north-central South Dakota, where a love for the land and the environment was instilled in her. Dr. Thorsensen has worked in Indian Country for her entire career in various positions, including as a Wildlife Habitat Biologist and Health Department Chief Executive Officer for her tribe. Julie, it is wonderful to welcome you to our panel today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. My name is Julie Thorsensen. Good morning. My name is Julie Thorsensen. My Lakota name means she carries her wisdom with her. I am Lakota and a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation in north-central South Dakota. I'm really happy to see you even if it's virtually. I'm also the Executive Director of the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, a position I've held since May of 2019. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about the benefits and challenges of including tribes into land-state conservation. And thank you, Deb, for kicking us off in a good way. I want to begin by giving a background of the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society. NAFWS is a 501c3 nonprofit organization founded in 1983 by a group of tribal fish and wildlife professionals that really saw a need for a place and a platform to network and raise tribal fish and wildlife issues to a national level. Our mission is to assist Native American and Alaska Native tribes with the conservation, protection, and enhancement of their fish and wildlife resources. We are a membership organization with over 227 support member tribes in our seven regions. This means that 227 individual tribal nations have given a resolution and support of our mission and our work. And as Deb said, we do not speak for tribes. We also have individual members, mostly tribal fish and wildlife professionals, are those who work with them throughout Indian Country. There are 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States as of 2022. This includes 229 Alaska Native tribes and over 100 tribes in California alone. Tribes are unique, sovereign entities. Tribal sovereignty means tribes have the inherent right to govern themselves. But each tribe has their own histories, cultures, and language and priorities. Tribes own or influence the management of nearly 140 million acres, including more than 730,000 acres of lakes and reservoirs, 10,000 miles of streams and rivers, and 18 million acres of forests. These lands and waters provide habitat for fish and wildlife, including more than 500 species listed as threatened or endangered. These lands and waters also provide the first foods, medicines, and cultural and sacred sites to Native people. Tribes are a vital part of fish and wildlife sustainability and conservation. Recent studies indicate that lands managed by Indigenous people are higher in biodiversity. The Native Land Information System found that while tribal lands make up 2.6% of the United States, these lands overlap with 12% of key biological areas. There's a lot of diversity within tribal programs. We have tribes that own zero land and some that own millions of acres. Land status in Indian Country is especially complicated due to various acts of Congress resulting in checkerboard reservations. It's important when working with tribes to understand tribal fish and wildlife programs run the entire spectrum, from formal programs dating back to the 1930s to our newly recognized tribes in the beginning stages of development and everything in between. As well as longevity, the complexity of programs is also from one conservation officer or licensing agent to programs with over 50 employees and multiple divisions. Given there are 367 treaties and multiple executive orders and court decisions, you can understand the authorities or jurisdictions is just as complicated. One of our most common requests for technical assistance at NAFWS is to help tribes identify funding sources. The inequity in funding for tribal fish and wildlife programs is perhaps one of the most obvious, but least known issues in Indian conservation work. Tribes are excluded from the Federal Aid and Wildlife Frustration Act and Federal Aid and Sport Fish Frustration Act are better known as Pitt and Robertson Dingle Johnson Funds despite decades of tribal effort to mend PRDJ funds despite tribal members paying these excise tax and despite tribal lands and populations being used to calculate the distribution of PRDJ. There is no guaranteed base funding for tribal fish and wildlife programs. Tribes must piecemeal their fish and wildlife programs in multiple funding sources, such as federal contracts through the Indian Self-Determination Education Assistance Act, federal grant programs like the tribal wildlife grants, other tribal funds such as casino and land lease revenue, and some tribes use hunting and fishing license revenue to fund their programs. However, this varies greatly based on resource, accessibility, marketing and the tribes overview of management. Additionally, it appears that tribes are not relying on managing fish and wildlife resources for outside revenue but more for tribal member use and subsistence. Tribes rely on grants as well from federal agencies, NGOs and nonprofits. In a recent survey conducted by NAFWS, we found that 83% of the tribes surveyed in the lower 48s had federal grants for their fish and wildlife program. And most of the time these funds are for projects and not the overall operation and maintenance of the program. Tribes must piecemeal their fish and wildlife programs through multiple funding sources. One tribe reported managing and reporting on 12 different grants to fund their fish and wildlife program in 2022. While grant funds will continue to be important to tribal fish and wildlife management, long-term wildlife management cannot be carried out one project at a time. This slide helps to better understand what the exclusion from PRDJ means to tribes. If you look at the distribution from fiscal year 2021 for lower 48 states of PRDJ funding, you'll see that it's around a little over a billion dollars. And despite tribal lands accounting for 3.6% of the lands of the lower 48 states, tribes received zero of that, but equate to about $37 million. It's really important to engage tribes and indigenous people for landscape conservation. And while we recognize that there are challenges to, and understand the challenges that tribal fishing and wildlife programs face, I've been asked more than once in my position to give the indigenous perspective or explain how tribes feel. And those are just not questions that I can answer. It really boils down to relationship building and getting to know your neighbors and your partners. It's been said many times if you work with one tribe, you know one tribe. And we often hear, well, we reached out to tribes we didn't hear back. But remember to keep in mind that tribes have bearing levels of capacity. And often it's not that tribes are not interested or not doing the work. It's that they have been historically left out of the conversations and the funding opportunities. It's important to take into account some of the challenges tribes deal with and understand that silence is not apathy. Imagine being a one person department. The reality is also sometimes it's hard to get fishing wildlife priorities to the top of the tribal government list, especially now when tribes, tribal leadership have been dealing with human health issues. Another factor to consider is the state tribal relations. Some tribes work hand in hand with states and have cooperative management plans and even some cross deposition of officers. While others do not play well together. An example of an issue would be contradicting management plans. Tribes may be managing for subsistence hunting, making sure the population is large enough to support every tribal member, whereas the state may be managing based on depredation complaints and trying to decrease the population. You want to make sure you connect with the right person. Many first attempts at tribal engagement go directly to the president or chairman of the tribe. And while that's not wrong, it just may take a while for that to trickle down to the person who's doing the management or field work and then more time for it to go back through the tribal process to give the answer. You want to get to know the tribe you're working with and be patient. I really think it's important to meet people where they are, ask them what is preventing them from participating, develop that solid relationship to truly work as equal partners. These relationships can't be based on information and extraction from tribes and tribal professionals only. There should also be a benefit for tribes. Many tribes I work with describe being asked for input, but not being included in the final product. Tribes are at the forefront of fish and wildlife management, whether that's through and threatening dangerous species work or species restoration such as salmon and buffalo, corridors work, habitat restoration projects and basis species work, climate change, you name it and I can probably find you a tribe that's working on it and doing really great work despite their funding limitations. Tribes are great partners and often times overlooked partners in conservation work. We all know wildlife do not respect the very detailed political boundaries established over the past 200 plus years. Therefore, we share in the responsibility to our fish and wildlife relatives. Tribes can provide a different perspective, often a more holistic viewpoint as being part of an ecosystem instead of an external manager. Traditional ecological knowledge is also being recognized more as valid science. One opportunity to engage tribes is through the state wildlife action plan. As states revise their swaps, they should increase efforts to engage and include tribes. This partnership has a potential to lead to states assisting with tribal wildlife action plans in preparation for recovering America's Wildlife Act passage. Recovering America's Wildlife Act is also a great way to work with tribes. And for the first time to my knowledge, tribes were included in the beginning and not as an add in after. We've also seen a lot of collaboration between tribes and states on recovering America's Wildlife Act. And the tribal title will provide base funds for tribal fish and wildlife programs. Remember that there are 574 unique fairly recognized tribes. We look different, we talk different. We don't all have casinos and per capita payments. But you know the atmosphere seems more welcoming to new opportunities for tribal engagement. And I'm encouraged every day by the growing number of native youth and professionals in fish and wildlife that are speaking up and speaking out. Let's hope this is the first step to a truly inclusive collaborative national framework. There are some great places to start, such as NAFWS and many more intertribal or regional tribal organizations that don't necessarily speak on behalf of tribes but can help identify and network the right contact person. For our federal partners, many already have existing pathways such as Executive Order 13175 and President Biden's commitment to improving and implementing it in his January 26, 2021 memorandum. Other federal examples include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Native American Policy and Co-Management and Federal Contracting Authorities under Public Law 93-638. There are too many voices missing from our conservation conversations. The barriers to participating in these conversations are real and the real path forward is to identify and remove as many of those barriers as possible. We met with an NGO once where we were told that we would be really happy to tell our story as they advocate for wildlife conservation and funding. We politely responded thank you but nobody tells our story better than us. And the problem is tribes lack the funding and capacity oftentimes to even be at the table to tell that story. We welcome the long overdue efforts to include tribes and other underrepresented populations and conversations, especially around conservation of natural resources. However, these efforts must be more than a box checking exercise. I'm going to leave you with this. NAFWS manages probably the largest network of tribal fish and wildlife professionals and we are constantly working on increasing partnerships. We're happy to connect you with the tribe and a region on an issue but again we do not speak for tribes. I think you'll find once you start reaching out and building those relationships how much tribes are doing for conservation. So please feel free to contact me or one of my staff and we will assist you. With that I say thank you and we will check you. Prayers for the health of the people. Thank you. Thank you Julie. Julie, before you turn your video off and mute yourself, where can people go to learn more about the upcoming conference? I saw that the abstract deadline has passed but I just want to make sure people know where to go if they're interested in learning more about that. Sure, they can visit our website at NAFWS.org. If you have questions for our panelists and we're only halfway through our panel we still have two more speakers coming up. You can send us questions and we'll do our best to incorporate those questions into our panel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you and we'll do our best to incorporate those questions into our discussion. You have two options, one you can send us an email to the email address to use is ask can follow us on Twitter where we're live streaming today's event and our Twitter handle is at ESI online. That brings us to our third panelist today. Anna Wern is the director of government affairs for the center for large landscape policies that reconnect habitats and promote collaborative conservation at the landscape scale. Previously, she worked for the National Forest Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the US House Committee on Natural Resources, and the Center for Natural Resources. Thank you, Dan. This morning, you've heard inspiring leaders discuss the role of federal and tribal agencies in collaborative, large landscape conservation. I will now be sharing with you the role of non-governmental organizations and GOs before turning it over to Sasha Spector, who will discuss the role of philanthropy in advancing the pace and scale of these collaborative efforts. Next slide, please. Two key ways NGOs are promoting locally-led, nationally-scaled collaborative conservation are through, first, on-the-ground action. By this, I mean supporting existing partnerships, catalyzing new partnerships and initiatives, and creating networks of partnerships. Second, through visionary action to advance a more durable and inclusive national landscape conservation framework. This includes convening and participating in dialogues, regarding shared goals, concerns, and needs, developing and advancing policy recommendations emerging from those convenings, and advocating for sustainable funding, including bolstering and coordinating federal investments and blending public dollars with private ones. Before fleshing out those roles, I wanna take a step back and share my perspective on what large landscape conservation means and why it's important. Large landscapes and seascapes are the spaces where people, species, and ecosystems interact, and where the local, regional, and national scales intersect. Coordinating at the level of a regional ecosystem or watershed allows community-driven conservation to achieve results at a magnitude not otherwise possible. This collaboration enables conservation partnerships, also called collaboratives, to address shared problems or goals that could not be tackled independently. Our 21st century conservation challenges, such as natural disasters, invasive species, zoonotic disease, and habitat fragmentation, all transcend geographic boundaries and the jurisdictions of individual natural and cultural resource management agencies. Effectively addressing these threats therefore necessitates a collaborative, transboundary approach. Next slide, please. Turning to the role of NGOs, one critical function they play is supporting existing partnerships across the country and catalyzing new initiatives. I can share two examples my organization has been involved in. Out East, we convened a climate advisory group in partnership with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy to catalyze the East Coast Climate Corridor Initiative, which was recently incorporated into the Appalachian Trail Landscape Partnership Strategic Plan. Out West, for over a decade, we have fiscally sponsored the round table on the crown of the continent, a group of leaders from tribes, first nations, government agencies, NGOs, and university partners in both the US and Canada, working together to conserve culture, community, and climate resilience. Science applications is providing, within the Fish and Wildlife Service, is providing critical technical support to this partnership, but a constant struggle, which is common of many partnerships, is collaborative capacity, also called Coordinated Infrastructure or Backbone Support. This includes the staff and systems to promote communication between members of a partnership, establish a shared purpose, and measure progress towards common goals. While NGOs often step up to fill this void, they tend to lack the resources necessary to play this role indefinitely. Thus, some partnerships fall apart due to a lack of sufficient stable funding or to support collaboration, and is therefore encouraging to see Congress provide explicit directives and funding to the Forest Service to invest in collaborative capacity under both the new infrastructure law and the fiscal year 2022 appropriations. I will return to the issue of funding at the end of my presentation, but now we'll go to the next slide and discuss another function, NGOs Play, which is connecting partnerships to create networks that share best practices and resources. For instance, the Regional Conservation Partnership Network is connecting collaboratives throughout New England to develop and implement a shared, long-term, large-scale conservation vision. At the national scale, the Network for Landscape Conservation, which is fiscally sponsored by the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, is a community of more than 250 organizations and 5,000 individual leaders in urban and rural landscape conservation across the country. Next slide, please. Recently, NGOs have been developing and convening and participating in dialogues regarding the value of and path towards developing a more durable and inclusive national framework for landscape conservation. They're also working to identify policies to achieve that shared vision for the future. I want to pause here and provide my interpretation of the firm national framework. What it does not mean is a top-down regulatory approach, but rather a set of enabling conditions to elevate shared conservation priorities and the challenges that emerge from the bottom up. This could include a national strategy for better coordinating policies, programs, and projects that address landscape scale challenges. It could also include a national network of collaborative conservation partnerships and of healthy lands, waters, species, and cultural resources. The next generation of landscape conservation dialogues have brought together a variety of governmental and non-governmental stakeholders at the local, state, regional, and federal levels who have identified the following principles that should undergird any future framework. Ensuring equity and inclusivity, promoting collaboration and coordination between federal, state, tribal, and local partners, providing long-term reliable funding that leverages public-private partnerships, integrating climate resilience efforts with biodiversity conservation efforts, and recognizing geographic differences and employing a bottom-up approach. A subset of participants in these dialogues also developed a set of preliminary policy recommendations, which are captured in the report on the materials section of EESI's briefing page and at the hyperlink below. At a high level, they include the following. Establish a body or convening structure to coordinate federal landscape scale, conservation, and climate resilience efforts. Establish a diverse advisory body, including non-federal stakeholders, to guide implementation. Develop legislation to establish long-term, reliable support for a network of landscape conservation collaboratives, including funding for science, conservation, and collaborative capacity. Next slide, please. NGOs like the Network for Landscape Conservation also helped organize a forum spearheaded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the future of conservation. Speakers included leaders from federal, state, and tribal agencies, departments and associations, as well as private landowners, business interests, and NGOs. Hundreds of participants in attendance met in breakout groups to discuss specific topics listed here. There appeared to be a common desire for weaving together efforts and creating decision support tools for strategically and collaboratively prioritizing conservation actions and investments. The needs that cut across all of those themes seem to be inventorying and existing efforts, partnerships, and lessons learned, building trust and collaborative capacity to cooperate across jurisdictions and scales, increasing equity, inclusion, and outreach, and securing more sustainable and robust funding, all of which echo the themes from the next generation of landscape conservation dialogues as well. Next slide, please. In addition to the dialogues regarding the national framework, NGOs have been initiating discussions regarding landscape conservation at the continental scale. For instance, last year, the Salazar Center for North American Conservation held a symposium on conservation impact. The event featured practitioners, researchers, and local leaders from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and indigenous territories who discussed large landscape conservation goals. Additionally, NGOs convened a series of transboundary dialogues to connect conservation partnership spanning the U.S., Canada border, and to discuss ways to address the impacts of development and climate change on transboundary landscapes. Next slide, please. NGOs have also been articulating the need for more robust funding for landscape conservation and collaboration. This includes securing larger amounts of money from more diverse sources over longer time horizons. The fiscal year 2022 appropriations legislation provided $12.5 million for cooperative landscape conservation. While it's encouraging to see that this program has continued to receive funding under both Republican and Democrat-controlled Congresses over time, this level represents about half of what the program received when it was launched in 2010 and approximately six and a half million less than was requested by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2022 and again yesterday in the 2023 fiscal year President's budget. Simply maintaining basic support to landscape conservation partnerships across the country requires more funding than the program currently receives but adequately addressing all the needs identified by the stakeholders in the aforementioned dialogues requires even more funding than the program originally received when it was established. What you see in this list below at fiscal year 23 funding are requests to conduct landscape conservation and resilience within a variety of federal programs. What is exciting about this list is that it reveals most natural resource agencies across departments are enthusiastic about engaging in collaborative landscape conservation, restoration, stewardship and connectivity efforts. However, this list also reveals an opportunity to better coordinate myriad disparate efforts across the federal family. Next slide, please. The infrastructure law is another piece of recently passed legislation with major funding for conservation and restoration. Making the most of these historic investments in landscape connectivity and ecological restoration requires an unprecedented level of coordination across and within departments. This includes not only natural resource agencies but others such as the Department of Transportation which is heavily investing in landscape connectivity under the new legislation. Next slide, please. NGOs have been brainstorming innovative policies, programs and models to better leverage funding for landscape conservation. This could include creating new programs modeled after successful examples such as the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership which involves funding and support from the departments of the Interior, Commerce, Agriculture and Defense as well as state, local and private sources. Or expanding re-grant programs like the Network for Landscape Conservation's Catalyst Fund, which invests in collaborative capacity building to match private dollars with public ones. Coordinating federal investments is necessary to strategically implement programs under annual appropriations, the new infrastructure law, the farm bill and the conserving and restoring America, the beautiful initiative. Furthermore, there's a real opportunity to attract private investments to match those public dollars. Pulling investments allows programs to be less vulnerable to shocks when one contributor withdraws funding due to shifting priorities or changing economic or political conditions. Overall, just as ecological resilience is bolstered by connecting large habitats with a diversity of species, funding resilience can be bolstered by increasing the size of the fiscal pot and funneling together a diverse set of sources feeding into it. Now I will turn it over to Sasha to discuss existing funding models and new opportunities. Thank you very much for your presentation today. And we are now going to turn to our fourth and final panelist, Sasha Spector is the program director for the environment at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, where he oversees all environmental conservation grant making. He also maintains positions as an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology and as a visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History. Previously, he was the director of conservation science at Scenic Hudson, leading the group's efforts on climate change, land conservation planning and natural resource stewardship. Sasha, welcome to our panel today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thanks Dan and thanks to my fellow panelists for their great presentations and this really, I hope I will be a briefer and as a funder who is supporting the work rather than doing the work sometime on the ground, my role is usually to get out of the way and but also to lift up the amazing work that our grantees and their partners are doing around the country. So with that in mind, I'll dive in. Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is a national funder of land and water conservation and stewardship and our programs dedicated to ensuring a thriving environment for both nature and people. And our grant making is focused at the intersection of nature, climate and equity. Now, like my fellow panelists this morning, we subscribe to the idea that landscapes and the collaborative efforts to conserve them is the most effective and inclusive operative approach for conservation planning and action and success. Next slide. Unlike a lot of the funders of nature and conservation work around the country, we are a national funder. And that gives us an opportunity to interact and learn from NGOs across the country. And also to see and think differently in some cases about what the community of conservation NGOs and their partners need. We are about 25 years old and we've over that period of time have helped protect almost 3 million acres of land across the country and supported hundreds of conservation initiatives across the U.S. This is an image of a major forest conservation project we've supported in the central Appalachians. Next slide. But we've also invested throughout that time in the strength of the conservation field by growing its science and human and organizational capacity to work on the ground as well as its future leadership including the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program which we supported seven universities around the country focused on growing the next generation of leaders in the conservation movement. Next slide please. Matt here for you is a landscape of landscapes. It's a 122 collaborative landscape conservation initiatives around the country, the result of a national survey by the Network for Landscape Conservation. Each one of these pastel polygons represents a set of partners working to conserve the places that are most important to the folks who inhabit that terrain, collaborating together on shared goals toward a shared vision, working across jurisdictions and thinking at an ecosystem scale. It is the operative unit of conservation in this country for achieving significant regional and national outcomes but the benefits are accrued locally. What's hidden here though is the systems of financial support that sustain the capacity for these local nonprofits and grassroots organizations that are the heart of most of these collaboratives. And for most of these organizations, private philanthropy and individual donors make up the lion's share of annual budgets that enable them to come to the table, to participate and to lead in these collaborative frameworks. The Landscape Conservation Collaborative Network that was intended to support those kinds of efforts, both with convening support as well as science and planning and a host of other technical assistance, was a wellspring of energy and resources for the NGOs who were at the table across the country and replacing that is the focus of this next generation potential for LCCs. But in the absence of that private philanthropy came to the table, recognizing the importance of that support for keeping collaboratives moving, keeping them resourced and keeping them engaged. Next slide please. For example, in Alaska, when the federal system of LCCs dissolved, the Northern Latitudes partnership came together in recognition that there was no better mechanism for them to achieve conservation across Alaska than to continue working together. And they've been able to persist despite the loss of the network, largely because they've been hosted by a non-governmental organization, the Alaska Conservation Foundation, with backing from public and private funding sources, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and a private philanthropy, the Volgino Foundation. It's remained the most vital collaborative vehicle in the state. Next slide please. In the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, as Anna mentioned, the Regional Conservation Partnership Network, long supported by the Heisted Foundation, is a network of 41 regional conservation partnerships. Each one is an informal but organized set of folks representing private and public organizations and state and federal agencies who work together to implement and plan for a shared long-term conservation vision across towns or states and sometimes even international boundaries. The Heisted Foundation, through its support to the network, has been providing strategy and planning grants, convenings, trainings, peer-to-peer learning opportunities, the kinds of technical supports and convening grants, or sorry, coordination grants, that enable these organizations and these partnerships to persist. And what they've seen over their decade-plus support for this network is that the very investments that we're describing in the coordination capacity of these partnerships is the most determinative factor in accelerating the pace of conservation and accelerating the pace of impact of these collaboratives. Next slide please. These are regional approaches and are also supported by regional funders. Two national funders, the Doris-Dugan Charitable Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation have partnered over the last three years with the Network for Landscape Conservation to support the Landscape Conservation Catalyst Fund, another funding model for supporting this collaborative work across the country with relatively modest grants to enable staff to coordinate these partnerships and opportunities for peer learning and training in collaborative best practice. We've been supporting dozens of collaboratives across the country. We heard during the application rounds that even without the grants themselves, the opportunity to learn from one another in these collaborative best practices and other approaches to effective collaboration would have been enough to draw these organizations together. The other thing that we heard was that the funding and support for the coordination of Landscape Conservation Collaboration are the hardest dollars for these collaboratives to raise. Each individual organization working to sustain itself and the extra meta level of funding required to sustain the collaboration is the hardest dollar to raise. So we're proud to have supported, up next slide please, 42 grants, totaling a million dollars across the country. But what's important is to know that 450 groups applied over those three grants cycles needing 10 million dollars. So the need is far, far outstripping private philanthropy's ability to meet. And yet we were excited to continue investing in this vehicle. So in the spirit of getting out of the way of the folks on the ground doing this work, let me just wrap with one final slide. Next slide please. It is to say that a new national framework for large landscape conservation and the collaborative approach is something that we hear a need from all of our partners in the nonprofit space as well as the agencies at federal and state and local levels. This new framework, whatever it is needs to be locally led but nationally supported in order to make sure that the sum of the parts of all of these individual regional collaboratives add up to a national impact. It needs to focus on long-term coordination and collaboration support as well as the science planning, implementation and engagement capacities that only the federal, state and other resource agencies can bring. And it can be built around these flexible models of public-private partnership where philanthropy and local supporters can partner with state and federal funders, funding agencies to support these kinds of efforts. We think this is the way forward and we're excited to be part of the dialogue in ensuring that federal support matches ours on the ground. Thanks, I'm happy to join the panel in questions. Thanks, Sasha. That was a great presentation. And I know you attributed those maps in your presentation, there were citations but just to the off chance that the person actually who made those maps, they're really nice, very seasonal colors and whoever's responsible for them, good job. And I hope everyone has a chance to go back and look at Sasha's presentation and go find those maps online where you can view them because they're so detailed that one of New England during the Northeast was just even that little slice of the country was so, there's so much stuff overlaid there, it was really interesting. Let me provide one last reminder to our audience while our panelists are turning on their videos and joining me for the Q&A. If anyone in our audience today has a question, you can ask it, you can send us an email, askask.org, can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online and we'll do our best to incorporate your questions into the discussion. But while we're waiting for additional questions, come in, let me start by asking a question and Deb, I'm gonna start with you and then we'll go to Julie and then to Sasha. Like to collaboration and organizations at different levels working together, major, major theme of our session today. And I would like to give everyone an opportunity to provide sort of one or two sort of exemplary examples of collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship with a special emphasis on sort of how the organizations that participated in that conservation sort of made up for the idea that none of these organizations could do it by themselves, that it really required that partnership of folks coming together and organizations coming together. So Deb, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it and like I said, we'll go to Julie and then to Anna and then to Sasha. Sure, I think, I'll speak from the perspective of the federal government and we have, that's what the science application program does is try to provide that coordinating effort in a landscape. It's also what our JVs, it's also the joint ventures, the migratory joint ventures do and the NIFHAP, the National Fish Habitat Partnerships do. I think the really good examples I provided the example of the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy. It spans 15 states. It's not led by the Fish and Wildlife Service but it's kind of, it's co-governed by the service and by the states and is broadening the tent. I really like it because the folks realize that it needs to be improved, that there's lots of improvement, they set those goals and they really do tailor it to users' needs. One of the successes of what Seacus has done is employ these user support specialists which really are the interpreters of the science to the users and helps adapt the tool to what the user's priority are. And I wanna give other people a chance to speak. I'll just give a shout out for the Intermountain West Joint Venture. I think they're doing a fantastic job out in a different geography in the Intermountain West and really using, I mean, they're all about birds, right? But they're really listening to the local landowners and their concern over water. They've got that water for initiative that is really locally led and that's their focus but it really supports the bird conservation as well. So sort of the meeting people where they are. Julie, let's go to you next. I think there's lots of examples in Indian country of collaboration. One that I think of right now off the top of my head is the Southern Ute Tribe and South part of Colorado and their ability to access Secretary of Order 3362 funds for big game migration despite tribes being excluded in that that Secretary of Order. They had done the mapping and had the data available. They worked with the Colorado Department of Transportation with Fish and Wildlife Service and the tribe really took the lead on that. And I think it's a really good example of how you can break down some of those political boundaries and focus more on the species and the landscape conservation. Anna? Sure. Well, I'd like to direct folks' attention to resources that highlight some peace studies. If you want to dig deeper and learn more. One is the CCAS Futures Report, which is on CCAS.org. That reviews four different case studies, the Western Native Trout Initiative, the Midwest Landscape Initiative, CCAS and Nature's Network out in the Northeast. So that gives you different geographic examples and examples of how regional associations of the associations of Fish and Wildlife agencies are partnering with federal, state, private NGOs to advance some of these collaboratives. So if you want to dig into those details, that's a great resource as is the white paper from AFWA on Landscape Conservation has some examples as well as the great article that you all featured in your latest newsletter again on the Alaska Conservation Partnership. I think the best metaphor for understanding or general type of example for understanding how the sum of the parts is greater as a whole is river restoration potentially. So think about having a shared goal around allowing salmon to reach their spawning grounds or removing pollution from a waterway in an interconnected river basin like that. If each individual collaborative is just trying to remove an obstacle or clean up pollution in one tributary independently, the overall goal will never be achieved. There'll still be obstacles in the way, there'll still be pollution throughout the system. They have to work together and create landscape conservation designs which is what science application does and collaborate and pool resources in order so that the entire system can function so that the salmon for example can go all the way from the headwaters out to the ocean and back. So that's just one general type of example where we see these collaborative efforts being really successful. And Sasha, I'm curious what you have to say in terms of other exemplary examples of how this has taken place. This is a little bit like asking somebody to choose between their children because there are just so many amazing examples that I would love to describe and the image behind me virtually anyway is of my home landscape in the Hudson Valley of New York. There's West Point in the distance there right on the Hudson River. And there is an amazing kind of round table of land trusts and other conservation activists in that region that's working toward a common vision. But I think when I think about the kinds of examples that are most inspiring to me, I think a couple of ingredients really come to mind. One is that they become vehicles for parochial actors. In other words, folks with narrow focus on a specific mission or a specific geography to see themselves in something bigger, to recognize that by contributing what they were contributing before within this larger framework, they contribute to the greater outcome or the impact that they couldn't achieve on their own and that when they make choices between option A and B and option B leads to a contribution at that higher scale, they're able to understand that choice in that moment because of the collaborative. And the other is that it's really bringing different people to the table who wouldn't meet or collaborate otherwise. And so in that respect, I've just mentioned two. One is the Appalachian Trail Landscape Partnership, which is knitting together some 70 partners along the length of the Appalachian Trail to think about not just the trail, but the landscapes that they are individually working to conserve as part of something far larger than they could ever attack on their own. And the other is the main land trust network and their first light work with the Penobscot and Pasamaquoddy and Malaseteen-McMack communities in Maine, bringing together the traditional land trust community with the traditional knowledge holders and land original landowners of the region to find new ways of reconciling some past injustices but also catalyze new conservation, not just transfer of existing conservation lands, but to catalyze new conservation through a new kind of partnership. So those two examples to me represent the best of what a landscape collaborative can ignite on the ground. I recognize with respect to my folks out West that ignite is not the verb I should be using these days. So I apologize for that. Thank you. Those are all great examples. Thanks to our panelists. And eventually we'll have a written summary of today's session as well. And so one of the benefits of that written summary is that we can sort of go back and have a good resource for what's in the Q&A as well as what's in the presentation. Deb, your presentation talked about sort of the challenges of collaborations, hard work, requires a dedicated focus. Julie, your presentation, for example, talked about making sure you're talking to the right people, finding the right people, establishing trust. How do we ensure that conservation efforts are led by local communities while also ensuring that the federal government provides the leadership that is necessary for it to provide to tackle large scale conservation issues? How do we find that balance between sort of letting someone at the local level take the lead but also having the federal government there doing what it does best, and providing maybe resources or the ability to gather people together? Deb, maybe we'll start with you and we'll go through the roster again of panelists. Sure, so Sasha said it better than I did it, but the hardest thing to fund is that coordination, right? And not just with coordination within your own organization but external to your own organization. And I think it's important to recognize that all of these efforts when you drill down are local, right? Like you're doing conservation on the ground with private landowners. And so they absolutely need to be locally led. But as I was stressing connectivity, it's beyond the scope of these local land trusts and these smaller NGOs to look and say, well, how do I stitch that together? And I think that that's the role of state and federal government is thinking beyond those boundaries and beyond those jurisdictions. And to be able to do that is to be able to either provide the funds for that coordination or provide that coordination as a service to stitch all of those pieces together. And I think it's super important, the inclusivity piece of things I think. I think also to Sasha talking about and Julie too and then Julie mentioned collaboration with tribes is we need all the voices at the table if we're gonna be successful. And I think at our own peril, we've been sort of exclusive because we've said, well, that's not conservation. I mean, people that are interested in recreation and providing recreational opportunities, that's conservation too. I mean, I think we need to think a little bit more broadly about conservation and it's not these pristine areas that are protected, but it's stuff that's not developed and helping with that connectivity piece as well. And I think that's a good role for the federal government and state governments of providing sort of that view from the balcony if you will. Julie, from your perspective, from NWS, FWS perspective what can we be doing to make sure that these efforts are sort of live up to what Deb just described but also give the federal government something constructive to be doing to help promote these efforts? Well, I think I mentioned it several times that tribes are just underfunded and under capacity and to really be able to have meaningful, robust and regular consultation, you have to be able to be at the table and so that's gonna require some funding just to get tribes up to that level. And the federal responsibility is a trust responsibility to the tribes and making sure that they are treated as sovereign entities and that they are heard but also being able to be there and be in those conversations. I mean, tribes have, I think they have something to say but I'll give you example of my good friend, Mitzi Reed who works for the Mississippi Banna Choctaw. We tease her all the time because her job title is so long because she is the wildlife biologist, the director, the conservation officer, she does a youth programming. I mean, all of these things that providing service to the tribe and to the resource, those take a lot of time and they take a lot of capacity. So I think the federal responsibility is being able to get tribes up to the same level as our counterparts so that we can participate in these discussions and have meaningful, robust, regular consultation. So not just providing the convening but also helping ensure that the convening is attended by the right people from the start. Right, and I mean, we get a lot of requests to attend and be part of different conversations and how do you, then it becomes like you have to choose and so which one do you prioritize? And for everyone that you don't attend, that's a missed opportunity to continue to have that tribal representation, that tribal voice that's been missing for so long. Anna, love to hear from you and then Sasha, sort of how we ensure that the local voices are sort of front and center in how these conservation efforts are planned and then move forward and implemented. Well, I'd say landscape conservation is inherently a beautiful blend of those two scales coming together. So it catalyzes and connects community-driven conservation priorities, partnerships and actions. That elevates local and regional efforts so that they can tap into greater resources, support tools that exist at the national and even the transnational level as well when countries work together as we've seen with those trans boundary dialogues. So an example would be restoration of the both coast or the Everglades. That's just simply not possible without state agencies and local communities identifying the most pressing priorities and then accomplishing those goals would not be possible without the government, federal government, funding, coordination and support. So for example, in the Everglades, that restoration plan back dating back to, I think 2000 or so, involved the Department of Interior, the Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, US Geological Survey, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Army Corps of Engineers along with the state of Florida. And then similarly in the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, in that example, the BP because of the oil spell pays into a trust fund and then states like Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, participate along with the Department of Agriculture, Commerce, Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the Army. So that combination of local leadership and state, tribal and federal government support allow partnerships to most successfully address large scale conservation issues like biodiversity loss, climate change, environmental injustice and other threats that natural resource-based livelihoods throughout the nation. Sasha, we'll give you the last word on this question. Sure, and I'm not sure I would amend anything that Anna and Deb and Julie have said. I think I would say that as a funder and thinking about it from the perspective of how we create the right tables and keep people there and sustain their ability to be there, I think that comes in two forms. One really is the kind of direct support that Julie was mentioning. We've got to make sure that all the partners in the chain have the resources to participate. And that means actually supporting their time and their staff capacity to do that. The other is how we sustain them with tools. And I think Fish and Wildlife has done a really amazing job over the last few years continuing some of that science work, supporting the kind of the technical elements of planning and actually putting these landscape visions that come out of the table into a spatial mapping system or however that sort of large landscape strategy comes into being, it's the kinds of science, climate adaptation, know how rigorous approaches that incorporate both Western science and traditional knowledge that will ultimately enable those actors to leave the table and go back and be effective. And so I think what we're really talking about in this kind of next generation is a system that is supporting the folks on the ground to be active participants and is creating the table for them to work around but is also sustaining them with the tools and the science that is needed to ensure that these are effective approaches that they're pursuing. Thank you very much. For this next question, maybe we'll start from the middle of the order. Maybe, Anna, we'll start with you this time. Come up a couple of times. There's this infrastructure law. It's out there. Congress passed it last November. President Biden signed it into law and it's gonna require a lot of coordination across a lot of agencies over the course of your presentations. Many of you mentioned it sort of in terms of specifics of what it was gonna provide. I'm curious, I've sort of a two-part question. One is sort of going forward, what lessons should we be applying from past landscape conservation to what's about to start happening or what's about to start happening? Yeah, my verb tenses are all messed up today. Going forward now that we have the infrastructure law and with special focus and this question comes to us from the audience and we're gonna incorporate it here. What should Congress be looking for as the infrastructure law is implemented? What are the kinds of things that might be an indication that it's working as intended or what might be an indication that maybe it needs to be improved to work as though it actually needs to work to fulfill the needs of all the people involved in these conservation efforts. Anna, we'll start with you and then we'll go to Sasha, Julie and we'll give Deb the last word on this one. Well, there's just so many exciting opportunities in the infrastructure law. I identified two of them in my presentation that I can elaborate on a little bit more and how lessons learned by be helpful in implementing those programs. So first, it's really exciting to see the partnership between the Department of Transportation, Department of Interior and Agriculture and other natural resource agencies on restoring habitat connectivity. So considering the ways in which linear transportation infrastructure like roads, railways, dams, et cetera can fragment these large landscapes that we're trying to protect for climate resilience benefits for both people and wildlife. So it's exciting to see the Department of Transportation roll out some of those programs and really looking to prioritize, for example, in the grant criteria for the wildlife crossing pilot program. One of the components that the Federal Highway Administration will be looking at in evaluating criteria is public-private partnerships and the extent to which applications leverage funding and have support from a variety of partners. So that will interpretations of the statute like that and will enable more collaboration and coordination as well. And then I also mentioned the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, for example, and there's explicit language in addition to that program around funding and directives for the Forest Service to prioritize collaboration and collaboration-based activities. So that's the type of statutory language that's helpful in encouraging federal partners to emphasize this landscape scale collaborative approach in implementing the infrastructure law. I'll just say a few quick lessons learned. Bottom up, an inclusive approach that includes stakeholders on the ground early and often, not as an afterthought, including community members and private landowners, co-equal cooperation with partners across jurisdictions, respecting the unique management authorities of federal state agencies and honoring tribal sovereignty, and then establishing a clear and compelling shared vision with specific and measurable goals and ensuring education and outreach efforts convey the value to partners in public. Sasha, we'll turn to you. What should we be looking for in terms of lessons learned in implementation and what should Congress be on the lookout for to determine if it's going well? Yeah, well, I would echo some of the explicit partnerships that are already happening or the coordination across some of the agencies that Anna just mentioned. But when I look at the $1.2 trillion there, and we're very excited to see something like 47 or eight or a billion going to the nature-based approaches for infrastructure, I think all of us are really interested in ensuring that the entire $1.2 trillion is spent in an alignment with these kinds of conservation outcomes that not just we, but that these organizations and these collaboratives across the country are sort of seeking. And so I think that the challenge here is finding the right tables or the right venues not just through public process, but through consultation with tribes, but these regional conservation partnerships who have done a lot of the science, who have understood understand the landscapes in order to ensure that we're not breaking connectivity opportunities or high priorities, high priority of biodiversity areas. But again, remember, there's only one landscape and all of these objectives around infrastructure and conservation have to be met on the same one, on the same single landscape. And which just really, it begs the question of how we do that from the outset so that it's not through, exclusively through the lens of a NEPA review, but much more a pre-NEPA consultation process that allows these projects to be cited right and designed right from the start. And that's through all kinds of infrastructure. Julie, let's turn to you. What should we be looking for as this infrastructure law is implemented? Well, I think Anna and Sasha both have great points and I would echo what they said. I think one of the things we wanna make sure is that the funding is accessible and there aren't barriers to people being able to access it. A lot of times I know it's grant funding, but something that may seem very simple in Congress such as a match is actually a huge barrier for many tribes to participate in funding. We're really excited about the connectivity pilot project and we do realize that that is a grant process, but I think that's a really great place to show some collaboration across a large landscape. And we have several tribes that are interested in this that are doing the work. We recently hired a wildlife connectivity coordinator and she's already had contact with 50 tribes that are interested are doing the work on the ground. So that's something we're really looking forward to. But again, we wanna make sure that it's equitable and that tribes are able to access that funding and that they're treated as true sovereigns. Also wanna make sure that as Sasha and Anna said that the process is downpacked and it's inclusive at the get go so that it is sustainable across years in administration. So I think there's a lot of opportunities here to get it right this time and I look forward to seeing that. Yeah, that issue of durability come up a lot today, something that we have to really keep in front of mind. Deb, I think this means you can help close us out. I think this means you have the last word. Okay, great. Thank you, thanks to everybody. So what everybody said, yes, and we need a national framework that helps decision to support of where the money goes. We don't know what our national priorities are. We don't know what the priorities are in a landscape when we're investing whether it's federal dollars or private dollars, those funders wanna know that we're going to accomplish what we set out to do and that we're gonna be able to move on. Yes, every place in the country in the world needs help conservation wise, but we can't keep spreading the dollars out and hoping that it all works out. We've gotta connect and we've gotta make some decisions. Is it grasslands? Is it coastal marshes? Is it water in the West? Is it fire? I don't know and I don't have an opinion about that but we need to have some consistency so we can help make decisions and make those investments and actually start accomplishing functioning ecosystems and connectivity in a very equitable and inclusive fashion. Well, thank you very much for those final comments and thank you for the four of you being fabulous panelists, Deb, Julie, Anna and Sasha. So it was a really, really excellent panel. We are just about out of time. So sorry about running a couple of minutes over but the four of you did a fabulous job and thanks also to Lynn for helping us kick off the panel today with her excellent introduction. In addition to sort of all the thanks of being great panelists today and a special thanks to you and your colleagues for helping sort of pull all these ideas together into a cohesive panel and the best panels are the panels with the best chemistry and the four of you had really, really fabulous chemistry and the way your comments built on one another. I think those are the kinds of things that when I'm in the audience of an ESI briefing which I used to do when I worked on Capitol Hill those are the things that really popped for me. So thanks to the four of you for being great panelists. As we close out, I would like to thanks everyone in our audience today for joining us. As we wrap up today, I'm very pleased to share that our next briefing will be April 8th and it will focus on the transformative potential of Justice 40, the administration's environmental justice initiative. We'll be talking about where it is today and where it needs to go. And you can visit www.esi.org to RSVP for all of our briefings. When you do, please take a moment to sign up for climate change solutions. We had lots and lots of great resources back in our March 15th issue about land management and conservation. And we have great resources coming up pretty much every day. And the best way to keep up with them all is to subscribe to our newsletter. We also have a few other briefing series popping at the end of April. My colleague, Daniel Bryan, just put up a reminder of our agencies and actions. He told me he was gonna do that and I just forgot. These are the four briefings in this series. Today, obviously building a durable national framework for large landscape conservation, but you wouldn't wanna miss any of the others. They were really, really great. And the webcast, the presentation materials, summary notes, all of that stuff is available online at www.esi.org. And our next two briefing series will kick off a little bit later in April, or in April. We will be looking at living with climate change. And we will also be talking about some of the big technological, high upside technology advancements and deployments that we need to make rapid gains to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So stay tuned for that. I mentioned climate change solutions a couple of times. This happens to be our last briefing in March. It also happens to be the last briefing that our colleague Amber Todorov has helped put together. Amber is leaving ESI in the coming days. She has lots of wonderful adventures ahead of her and we will miss her dearly. So I just wanted to acknowledge all the hard work that Amber put into this briefing, but also our climate change solutions newsletter. She came up with our very first briefing mini series back in April, 2020 climate adaptation data, which was a big success. So thanks very much to her and for being a great colleague and we wish her all the best as she takes her next steps. And I'll let her fill in all the details herself one on one, but she's really great stuff ahead of her and we're very, very proud of her and we wish her all the best. So thanks to her for all of her work. Thanks also to all my colleagues, Dan O'Brien, Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna and Savannah and our interns Emily and Grace for pulling everything together and live tweeting and keeping track of slides and all of that. Thanks very much to them. This last slide is a survey. It only takes two minutes. We read every response. People in our audience have two minutes to take our survey and let us know what you thought of today. Did the audio sound okay? Did the video look okay? Do you have ideas for future topics? Like I said, we read every response and it means a lot when our audience takes time to help us improve. So this is the link you can use to take the survey if you have a moment, we'd really appreciate it. We're a couple minutes over, I'm sorry about that. Thanks again to Lynn for the wonderful introduction and to our panelists, Deb, Julie, Anna and Sasha. We'll go ahead and wrap it up there and I wish everyone a great rest of your Tuesday and thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next time.