New Colorado Plan Could Be a Big Opportunity for Big Game

It’s no secret that wildlife need room to roam—in order to feed, breed, and fulfill their critical role in maintaining broader ecosystem balance. But only recently, through advancements in science and technology, have experts begun to understand precisely where and when movement occurs, in addition to how important these migrations are to millions of animals.

Each new data set that pours in from the Global Positioning System (GPS) collars affixed to thousands of animals throughout Colorado and the American West helps experts, policymakers, and others better understand the essential role of landscape permeability—the measure of how easy or difficult it is to move through an area—on ecosystems and wildlife such as mule deer, elk, and bighorn sheep.

These migrating herds of wildlife are a core part of Colorado’s way of life and economy, too. According to the Colorado Wildlife Council, hunting and fishing bring in over $3.25 billion to the state annually, supporting more than 25,000 jobs.

So conserving them is a priority for the state. And with new scientific information in hand, combined with new state and federal conservation policies, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Colorado recently released a draft plan amendment intended to conserve the state’s migrating wildlife. The plan amendment will affect all of the agency’s management plans spanning 8.3 million acres of public lands across the state. When finalized in coming months, the amended plans should better guide how oil and gas development may occur on public land in order to conserve big game migration corridors and other important habitat.

When the BLM’s conservation plan was initiated in 2022, The Pew Charitable Trusts lauded the agency’s effort while pointing out that the agency should also consider other factors that could affect migration corridors and big game habitat, such as those from renewable energy development, recreation, and road/trail densities. At that time, the BLM did not plan to include bighorn sheep in the proposed planning outline, which would have left the species’ habitat and migratory corridors open to myriad threats.

The BLM's draft Big Game Resource Management Plan Amendment (RMPA), released in November 2023, is a step in the right direction: It includes bighorn sheep (among other species) but continues to miss the opportunity to address key impacts to migration and seasonal habitat.

The draft plan—compiled from input from community members, experts, and agency staff—includes several options for conserving migration routes, including one the BLM prefers. In this case, the preferred option falls short in effectively prohibiting oil and gas development in critical corridors, instead imposing a standard on the densities of oil and gas wells in a given area, which drillers can circumvent by simply paying into a fund that could benefit habitat somewhere else. Known as “compensatory mitigation,” this isn’t an effective conservation strategy for migration corridors because they cannot be artificially created elsewhere and, once lost, are generally gone forever. Furthermore, the BLM’s preferred alternative would still leave 86% of state-identified High Priority Habitat open to oil and gas leasing.

Pew and our partners in Colorado are calling on the BLM to choose a more effective option for conserving migratory and seasonal habitat. Among the options in the draft plan, the one known as Alternative D better incorporates more scientific information regarding the effects of oil and gas development on habitat and corridors, and it would close lands from oil and gas development where there is low and moderate potential for development. Alternative D builds on the agency’s preferred option—Alternative B—which applies a 3% “disturbance threshold” (or amount of land that can be developed in an area); that threshold stems from the findings of a 2020 scientific study.

Additional recommendations that Pew and others are making for the BLM’s consideration include:

• Expand No Surface Occupancy (NSO) allocations. NSOs can prohibit oil and gas development in critical areas such as migration corridors and other habitat important to big game life cycles, such as wintering grounds. Using GIS data from the BLM CO Big Game Habitat Conservation for Oil and Gas Management RMPA Public Web Map, under existing management and the BLM’s preferred alternative, 7.4 million acres or 86% of high-priority habitat identified by Colorado and the BLM would remain open to oil and gas leasing. Instead, the BLM should permanently protect areas crucial for wildlife, especially those with low oil and gas potential. Oil and gas development can occur in more suitable locations; high-priority wildlife habitat is irreplaceable.
  
  
• The BLM should conduct what’s called a comprehensive cumulative impact analysis, which would not only cover oil and gas development, but also factor in the cumulative impacts of other energy production projects, residential development, and recreation. This type of assessment would provide insight into the most important impacts on migration corridors and other key habitat. If the BLM will not incorporate such an assessment in its final decision for this RMPA, we hope to see a commitment for pursuing it in the near future.

This statewide RMPA could have influence beyond Colorado: Its basic tenets can serve as a model for other BLM state offices interested in addressing the conservation of migration corridors across public lands. Working at the statewide level rather than through individual regional management plans, Colorado’s plan could efficiently address conservation needs at a larger scale and better align with the scope and characteristics of wide-ranging wildlife migrations.

Pew expects to see a final decision later in 2024 and looks forward to the Colorado BLM finalizing a plan, but only after strengthening it. 

Matt Skroch is a project director and Pat Lane is a senior officer with the U.S. conservation project.