Peninsular Florida Landscape Conservation Cooperative

Notes

Peninsular Florida Landscape Conservation Cooperative

Steering Committee Meeting

August 21, 2012

Orlando, Florida

Updates

1.  Landowner Incentives Committee - Dawn Jennings, representing Dave Hankla, gave a brief update. The Committee has not formally met yet but is considering holding a meeting with selected landowners to provide a briefing on a number of issues and opportunities including development of BMPs and voluntary programmatic agreements to accommodate listed species and landowner needs.

2.  Geomatics Working Group – Gary Knight was unable attend the meeting. No report.

3.  Status of the Science Coordinator position – There are 4 certificates of eligibility comprised of 52 unique individuals. After screening, a subset will be provided to the interview board: Tim Breault, Tom Logan, John Tirpak and Rua Mordecai.

New Topics

1.  Proposed new Steering Committee member – Ken Passarella was nominated and approved to be a new steering committee member. Ken heads an environmental consulting firm that works for private and public owners on wetland mitigation and listed species issues. Motion was carried by unanimous consent.

2.  Landowner incentives white paper – Tom Logan (copy posted on partner site http:/peninsularfloridalcc.org)

·  Private lands do and have potential to serve a much greater role for conservation in FL

·  What are meaningful incentives that would work for the landowners?

·  Chuck Littlejohn provided contacts for 10 private land members that together represent 2 million acres – a significant portion of private landscape

o  Management costs versus return is a pivotal factor

o  Conservation has an associated cost and value – must be an added value not a liability

o  Natural areas and linkage preservation – private lands can provide

o  Can provide for species recovery

o  How to strategize with the listing needs of the litigated/need to recover species

o  Fresh water storage, water quality enhancement, phosphorus removal, ground water recharge can all be provided

o  Carbon sequestration needs

o  Transportation/utility corridors added

o  Accommodate public facilities, schools, hospitals, prisons – smart planning to accommodate human needs

o  Smart planning for human needs in areas of lower conservation value

·  What makes conservation impossible?

o  Uncoordinated duplicative excessive unpredictable government regulations and processes. .

o  Agencies must coordinate to improve and apply rules to make possible facilitate, reward, conservation that is achievable under existing laws

o  Focus on the achievement with reward rather than individual loss with penalty – a philosophy change

·  What is possible?

o  Conservation presently is occurring and substantially more is possible

o  Concerns for consequence of success – still don’t trust the government – which one or all?

o  Conservation opportunity must add value – rather than a liability. Specifically, cannot be a consequence for managing listed species on private lands

o  Ecosystem services must be compensated – there is a cost – and it must be compensated in some form of economic value

o  Layering – services to increase conservation gain and reduce mgmt. cost – time limited, in perpetuity, no opportunity to come back and add additional layers, could remove layers

·  Incentives/Compensation economic value

o  Not looking for incentives but for compensation

o  Regularity assurances and certainty

o  Fee payment for services

o  Credit commodity – to sell, exchange, use

o  Presumption of compliance – BMPs are real important for landowners and landowners are pleased with this, section 6 agreement in FL, provisions under ESA that reduces duplication in permitting, coordinating with PO’s to reduce candidate species from listing

o  Safe harbor protection and baselines

o  Compensation for ongoing activities to assure continuation and support of new services

o  Tax relief

o  Layering of services – flexibility

o  Other forms of authorizations for ecosystem services – involving residential development in exchange for conservation services

o  Fee title acquisition – fits in some cases

o  Easements – some cases, not much interest in easements – why? Not flexible for adaptive management

o  Non-permanent agreements – can be long term – ‘non-flexible agreement’

§  Flexible

§  Allow evaluation and modification

§  Add /remove layers if needed

§  Adaptive management as landscape changes

§  Can be long term

§  Greater benefits above baselines

o  Cindy Dohner – Eliminate threats to preclude the need to list. We have flexible agreements that would allow you to shift within the habitats - a shifting baseline. Faster and more flexible process is needed. DC is allowing us to be more flexible.

o  Tom Logan – if a species is already listed or a candidate, the rules are more rigid than a non-candidate species management agreement. Agreements tend to be more process focused than product or outcome based, thus limiting the ability to be flexible

·  Delivery Considerations

o  Compensation must be science based and measureable

o  Collaborative across stakeholders/agency lines

o  Repeatable and fair and avail to all dependent upon different landowner circumstances, interests, business models.

o  Achievable, cost effective on private lands, especially where healthy systems have been preserved. Most expensive where we have to recreate habitats

·  Question - Were small family farms included in this synopsis? – No, nothing smaller than 100k acres was included. The smaller the landowner the more important the black vs. red line becomes. Perfect Partners Program with the Farm Bureau was a great program. Focus was on managing the family farm and providing for conservation. It was highly effective – only a one year project and never heard of it again. Need to revisit this program and bring it into the mix of things

·  Question - White paper – does it have data and is it available? – Yes

·  Cindy Dohner-

o  Incentives for private landowners – safe harbor agreement

o  Incentives – candidate conservation agreements with assurances with private and state lands – sect 7a1 requires that we do all we need to do for ES. This agreement is for non-listed species. Provides automatic take so no more additional federal permitting

o  Section 6 agreements

o  Piloting on crediting – by DOD. Susan Gibson with DOD in Atlanta. Why no crediting system for military bases – like a mitigation bank – base to base mitigation. Gary Frazier, Michael Beane and Dan Ashe – all on board

o  BMPs – wonderful way to do assurances. Met with the state foresters in the SE, moved the idea. Response was that BMPs are rarely implemented on the ground. Lack of use or compliance jeopardizes the approach. There needs to be assurances that listed species threats are being addressed so this is a high bar.

·  Comment: Take a second look at BMPs in FL – biannual compliance required, FL is different than other states in our region. Sustainable forestry initiative – doing even more, BMPs primarily water quality so aquatics given a large measure of protection, BMPs – Florida Lands Counsel fully supports BMPS and wildlife

o  HCP – no surprises rule, first time doing regulatory assurances under ESA.

·  Landowner surveys – more data forthcoming. Ag and BMPs – wildlife BMPs too. CCB current incentive programs. Converging datasets and ideas coming together right now

·  Ernie Cox – core group of landowners very involved in conversation. LCC can bring some of these things home. Execution is the new phase. Landowners have lots of data but need certainty. Cards and rules. No harm to anyone as we work our way through this. If there is value they will want to do this. Large vs. smaller landowner tools and concepts may be different so need to define

·  Small vs. large landowner – requirements need to be the same for both – from the large landowners perspective. Requirements need to be tailor made to the parcel due to inherent difference in land and value to ES. Parcel size issue – 10k acres two owners, 10k acres 1000 landowners - which one should be targeted for conservation?

·  Joe Walsh – Smaller lands and incentives should be altered. Needs different for different species – could provide not a full range of species needs but certain values – like forage.

·  Steps – quantify the costs/economics

·  Perfection is the enemy of the good – shoot for good not status quo.

3.  Participation in developing a Southeast Conservation Adaption Strategy - PowerPoint presentation by Tim Breault. Presentation is posted and the Steering Committee approved the PFLCC being fully engaged through staff and partners.

4.  Surrogate Species effort by FWS – Cindy Dohner

·  Need to be able to design landscapes that conserve wildlife

·  Open pine decision support tool example – where would be spend our resources best. The open pine tool focuses on 6 species, where can we have fires and WUI problems. It uses only a small portion of the open pine system – allows redirection of dollars to the most important areas.

·  SHC landscape conservation – SE region was a pilot for SHC.

·  Don’t have the science capacity to do the climate change work, therefore LCCs, climate science centers,

·  Next step is figuring out how to design landscapes that are big and have so many spp.

·  How do we figure out how all the partnerships and from there figure out the species needed so that conservation is developed on the landscape

·  Niche species - need to watch

·  Performance measures will be readied to include species protection goals

·  Budgets will start being developed in the future around surrogate spp.

·  Surrogate Spp. Draft guidance out – workshops next but not to select species to be joined with state wildlife action plans.

·  Having workshops to understand the approach

·  EPA volunteer monitoring program – citizen science

5.  Update on LCC and Southeast Climate Science Center Collaboration – Dr Jerry McMahon provided a PowerPoint presentation which is posted on the partners site

·  SECAS – use as an example of Wicked Problems

·  Response to SECAS problems –

·  Structured Decision Making – approach to dealing with Wicked Problems. PrOACT

·  Consequences table

·  FY12 science dollars funded

·  Biological condition gradient

6.  Update on FWS science funding for 2012 – Steve Traxler provided a PowerPoint which is posted on the partners site

Steering Committee Members Attending

1.  USDA Forest Service – Carl Petrick

2.  USFWS – Cindy Dohner

3.  DOD – Paul Ebersbach

4.  NOAA – David Brown

5.  FWC – Thomas Eason

6.  FDACS – Ray Scott

7.  Florida Farm Bureau – Charles Shinn

8.  The Nature Conservancy – Doria Gordon

9.  Florida Land Council (BDA – Inc) – Tom Logan

10.  U of FL Center for Landscape Conservation - Mary Oakley

11.  Family Lands Remembered – Ernie Cox

12.  Wildlands Conservation- Julie Morris

13.  Plum Creek – Greg Galpin

14.  USGS – Barry Rosen

Submitted by Tim Breault

September 12th, 2012

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