By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Daniel M. Ashe was confirmed by the Senate as the 16th director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Ashe, a career employee of the service, has led efforts to build the agency’s science-based wildlife management capacity.

One of his first official duties was to address the Outdoor Writers Assoc. of America conference, where he said because of reductions to the farm bill in fiscal year 2011 and additional reductions for 2012, the USFWS is losing the ability to use that bill to encourage conservation, Ashe said.

“That is a serious impediment for us going forward,” he added.

The biggest challenge Ashe faces is losing funding at the same time as commodity prices are increasing, bringing more threats to turn prairie land into grain fields, he said. “We’ve got the twin challenge of significantly reduced resources at a time when we’re seeing significantly increased challenge,” Ashe said. “Dealing with that short term is of the highest priority.”

One of the major focuses Ashe is working on is the development of a series of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives across the nation, through partnerships with states, non-government agencies and private landowners, he said.
Ashe said he is excited USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and President Obama have been active in a discussion about America’s great outdoors.

By creating these Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, the agency hopes to better deal with the impacts of landscape-level challenges such as climate change, invasive species, water scarcity and other big issues, Ashe said.
“What we see increasingly is that we can build conservation around large landscapes like the flint hills in Kansas, the Dakota grasslands in North and South Dakota,” he said.

“By working with the ranching and farming communities, we can keep them on the landscape and by using easements to give them the economic value of the land, allow them to keep it in a ranching or farming lifestyle that is good for wildlife.”

The Natural Resources Conservation Service has been an ally in getting assistance for the cooperatives, Ashe said.

The USFWS has been contributing funds from the Duck Stamp and the Land and Water Conservation Effort Act. “Bringing all of that together is the key to success,” Ashe said.

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Interior and Environment Appropriations, however, approved a bill that proposes an 80 percent reduction for the Land and Conservation Fund while severely cutting other conservation funding.
Beyond the financial aspect, for the long term the greatest challenge Ashe faces is dialing down the controversy around many conservation issues, he said.

“Let’s celebrate success so we can move on to deal with the issues of today,” he added. “We have to have a much better capacity to deal with things like changing climate and what’s that going to mean … If we don’t solve those questions now, we’ll be at crisis in five to 10, 20 years from now. Those are the challenges of our day. I’d like to help address them if I can.”