the rainwater basin joint venturerwbjv.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/rwbjv-2014-annual... ·...

The Rainwater Basin

Joint Venture

Annual Report

October 1, 2013-September 30, 2014

The Rainwater Basin Joint Venture

The mixed-grass prairie region of Nebraska contains a rich

variety of habitats for birds and other wildlife. From the

Rainwater Basin and Platte River system to the Central Loess

Hills and the Sandhills, we are in the midst of landscapes that

form a crucial link in the migration routes of many avian spe-

cies, and provide breeding habitat for many others.

The Rainwater Basin Joint Venture and a growing number of

partners work together to ensure that these important habitats

will remain healthy – and even improve—for generations to

come.

For landscapes throughout the mixed-grass prairies, our sci-

ence office and partners work together to develop tools need-

ed for strategic habitat conservation. Some of these tools

identify priority species and define their habitat needs; others

identify key habitat areas or help pinpoint sites where conser-

vation efforts are likely to be most effective. Our science

partners also coordinate research and monitoring projects that

help fill the knowledge gap in local conservation science, and

evaluate the success of our conservation efforts.

In south-central Nebraska, the Joint Venture and its partners

of long standing use these science tools, and share their ex-

pertise and resources to put conservation acres on the ground,

thus providing and maintaining high-quality habitat for the

millions of ducks, geese, shorebirds, and cranes that migrate

through this region each spring.

We are pleased to provide you with a summary of the part-

nership’s achievements in Fiscal Year 2014.

Coordinator

Andy Bishop

Management Board

Tim McCoy, Ph.D., Chair

Nebraska Game and Parks Commission

Peter Berthelsen

Pheasants Forever

Bob Bettger

Fillmore County Landowner

Ardell Epp

Hamilton County Landowner

Gloria Erickson

Phelps County Landowner

Ken Feather

Upper Big Blue Natural Res. District

John Denton

Ducks Unlimited

John Heaston

The Nature Conservancy

Clint Riley

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Michael Onnen

NE Assn. of Natural Resources Districts

Dave Raffety

Tri-Basin Natural Resources District

Steve Shaw

Little Blue Natural Resources District

Greg Reisdorff

Farm Service Agency

Mel Taylor

Fillmore County Landowner

Britt Weiser

Natural Resources Conservation

Service

The Year in Review: 2014

At its first meeting of Fiscal Year 2014, the RWBJV Manage-

ment Board marked a milestone by approving the partner-

ship’s revised Implementation Plan. Several years in the mak-

ing, this document lays out conservation goals for the next

twenty years. The objectives are supported by four additional

conservation plans – for waterfowl, shorebirds, water birds,

and land birds – which were also approved at the November

meeting.

All five documents were finalized and published on the

RWBJV website in December. Also nearing completion in

early 2015 was the “Best Management Practices for Rainwater

Basin Wetlands,” a tool to help land managers, private lands

biologists, and landowners make management decisions to

improve habitat conditions. The document was based on a

decade of habitat assessment, management reporting, and veg-

etation monitoring supervised by members of the Public Lands

Workgroup.

After 19 years, February’s RWBJV Informational Seminar

moved to a new location – Grand Island’s Midtown Holiday

Inn – to accommodate an ever-growing attendance. One hun-

dred and seventy participants attended this year’s event, which

focused on human dimensions. The seminar was funded in

part by a Nebraska Environmental Trust Public Information

and Education mini-grant administered by the Nebraska Acad-

emy of Sciences, Inc.

As we do every year, the RWBJV and several of our partners

hosted tours during spring migration. Among the groups who

saw the results of our conservation success were the board of

Ducks Unlimited’s Wetlands America Trust; staff of Ne-

braska’s congressional delegation, and attendees at the annual

coordination meeting of the U.S. Forest Service and Nebraska

Game and Parks Commission.

The Nebraska Environmental Trust continues to be an indis-

pensable partner in project funding. In April, the RWBJV re-

ceived approval of five Nebraska Environmental Trust grants

totaling $652,624 for habitat work in the Rainwater Basin re-

gion, including wetland habitat and restoration, development

of grazing infrastructure, wetland vegetation management, and

watershed restorations. In addition, the Joint Venture received

first-year funding for a grant to help expand the use of pre-

scribed fire in the Central Loess Hills to manage eastern red

cedar. The Little Blue Natural Resources District and Nebras-

ka Association of Resources District both received approval

Science Coordinator

Dana Varner, Ph. D.

Technical Committee

Kirk Schroeder, Chair


Jeffrey S. Abegglen

U.S. Forest Service

Matt Hough

Ducks Unlimited

Mike Estey


Ted LaGrange


Murray Laubhan


Ronnie Sanchez


Ritch Nelson

Natural Resources Conservation Service

Rich Walters


John Thorburn


Mark Vrtiska, Ph. D.


Ben Wheeler

Pheasants Forever/Quail Forever

Year in Review, contd.

for second-year funding of grants to benefit

Rainwater Basin habitat.

Also in the spring, we unveiled a redesigned li-

brary page on the RWBJV website. The new

page simplified access to dozens of RWBJV

documents and allows us to readily expand the

types of information and resources we provide in

the future.

Resources available on the website’s GIS Prod-

ucts page expanded as well over the course of

the summer, as an indication of the strides the

RWBJV Science Office continues to make in

providing tools that our partners and other con-

servation professionals can use in biological

planning and conservation design around Ne-

braska. For example, the Northeast Habitat Man-

agement Decision Support System helps predict

and identify geographic areas best suited to max-

imizing the various conservation objectives of

multiple stakeholders. The Decision Support

System for Advanced Biofuel Plants was devel-

oped to help ethanol producer Abengoa Bioener-

gy and conservation partners identify areas

where it would be most beneficial to convert bio-

fuel input production to alternative crops such as

sorghum or switchgrass, And the RWBJV

worked with the Natural Resources Conservation

Service to construct a Soil Erodibility Index for

Nebraska, to identify areas of highly erodible

soils across the state.

Near the end of the fiscal year, after a nationwide

search, we announced the hiring of Dana M.

Varner, Ph.D. as the new RWBJV Science Coor-

dinator. The Science Coordinator position results

from a partnership between the RWBJV, the

University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Nebras-

ka Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit. Dr. Var-

ner brings experience in studying waterfowl be-

havior and ecology; we are fortunate to have her

expertise as we work toward the objectives of

our revised Implementation Plan.

The RWBJV achieved a milestone this year by

publishing the partnership’s revised Implementa-

tion Plan, a document that sets forth our objectives

– and strategies to achieve them – for the next

twenty years. The Joint Venture’s first Implemen-

tation Plan, adopted in 1992, was concerned only

with waterfowl habitat in the Rainwater Basin

wetland complex. In the future, while our empha-

sis will remain on wetland habitat in the Rainwa-

ter Basin, our newly adopted plan will incorporate four bird conservation plans – for water-

fowl, shorebirds, waterbirds, and landbirds. Each of these plans scales down the corresponding

national bird conservation plan to the regional level. The new plan also addresses several addi-

tional geographic focus areas within the RWBJV Administrative Area: the Central and North

Platte River, the Sandhills, the Central Loess Hills, the Missouri River, the Northeast Prairie/

Elkhorn River, the Republican River/Blue River Drainages and Loess Canyons, and the Verdi-

gris-Bazile Creek Drainages.

The Implementation Plan employs the four elements of the Strategic Habitat Conservation

Model. Biological Planning identifies priority species, population objectives, and the relation-

ship between species and their habitats. Conservation Design determines a landscape’s ability

to support species at target levels, and thus develops habitat goals. Decision support tools help

to strategically identify sites or areas for Conservation Delivery. Finally, Research, Invento-

ry, and Monitoring efforts evaluate the key uncertainties identified in the planning and imple-

mentation phases, as well as the outcomes of conservation projects.

In the Rainwater Basin region, we applied Strategic Habitat Conservation methods to deter-

mine habitat requirements, based on the daily energetic requirements of waterfowl and esti-

mates of the number of waterfowl that migrate through the area each spring. Based on these

estimates, we projected that RWB wetlands must, in an average year, provide approximately

4.4 billion kilocalories of forage to meet the physical needs of migrating waterfowl. And based

on our estimates of the number of kilocalories per acre provided by early-successional plant

communities, we identified a need for approximately 22,000 additional acres of wetland habitat

on public and private lands. But just as importantly, we developed strategies to maximize the

habitat value of wetlands already restored or protected, through: 1) management of plant com-

munities; 2) selectively filling reuse pits and other hydrologic alterations, so that wetlands pond

more frequently and over a larger area; and 3) protecting restored wetlands with upland buff-

ers.

In the Rainwater Basin and the other seven geographic focus areas, our strategies and goals

demonstrate that wildlife habitat can be a functioning part of a productive agricultural land-

scape. The Implementation Plan and the four bird conservation plans can be read in their en-

tirety on our website: http://rwbjv.org.

Charting the Future: The RWBJV’s Revised Implementation Plan

Administrative extent of the RWBJV

A Banner Year for the Partnership

One of the comprehensive objectives of the RWBJV’s Implementation Plan is to broaden the

partnership’s financial base. We made progress toward that objective in Fiscal 2014 by lev-

eraging a record $5.6 million, which came from over a dozen partners and funding sources.

Approximately 60 percent of the funding was from non-federal sources; non-federal dollars

in matching funds helped the partnership bring over $1.7 million in federal grants to Nebras-

ka. This type of leveraging demonstrates one of the many benefits of partnerships. Working

together, partners are often able to raise significantly more in grant funding than the sum of

what they could accomplish individually.

Better yet, the funds allowed RWBJV partners to implement a variety of conservation

measures on a record 10,200 acres. Indeed, the lion’s share of grant funds this year, as in any

year, went to on-the-ground implementation of habitat improvement. Conservation accom-

plishments included fencing and wells to facilitate grazing on privately owned wetlands, tree

removal, over $600,000 for pit fills that improved watershed function in several Waterfowl

Production Areas and Wildlife Management Areas; other wetland enhancement on public

lands; wetland restorations on several private tracts; disking and chemical treatment under

the RWBJV Management Initiative, and several easement and acquisition projects.

The diversity of funding and projects is possible only through the commitment, creativity,

and hard work of the RWBJV’s dedicated partners.

Income and Expenses — Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2014

FUNDING

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Allocation 458,465.00

Grants

Nebraska Environmental Trust 650,111.12

Other Grants and Funding Awards 4,517,813.48

Total Grants and Other Funding 5,167,924.60

Total Available Funding $ 5,626,389.60

EXPENSES

Regional Overhead and Admin. Support 36,928.91

Coordination 253,776.35

Communication 87,884.06

Planning 40,082.81

Monitoring, Evaluation and Research 431,587.18

Project Development and Implementation 4,776,130.29

Total Expenses $ 5,626,389.60

1234 Federal Allocation:

Expenditure by Funding

Category

Rainwater Basin Joint Venture 2014

Partnership Funding

Funding from federal and non-federal

RWBJV partners totaled $5,167,924.60.

$4,631,986.52, or 89.6% of this, went to

implementation. Funding from partners leveraged the 1234 Federal Allocation

into total partnership funding of

$5,626,389.60, 84.9% of which went to

implementation.

Regional Admin Support 0.0%

Coordination 1.5%

Communication 1.7%

Planning 0.1%

Monitoring 7.1%

Implementation 89.6%

Regional Admin Support8.1%

Coordination 38.7%

Communication 0.0%

Planning 8.0%

Monitoring 13.8%

Implementation 31.4%

Rainwater Basin Joint Venture

Partners include:

Rainwater Basin landowners

Nebraska Environmental Trust

Ducks Unlimited

Farm Service Agency

Little Blue Natural Resources District

Natural Resources Conservation Service

Nebraska Association of Natural Resources

Districts


Pheasants Forever




U.S. Forest Service

Upper Big Blue Natural Resources District

County Highway Departments

….and many other groups and individuals

www.rwbjv.org

the rainwater basin joint venturerwbjv.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/rwbjv-2014-annual... ·...

Documents