The Hub Conservation Area - Montanans 4 Safe Wildlife Passage

American Wildlands’ PriorityLinkage AssessmentIn 2007, American Wildlands developed a PriorityLinkage Assessment (PLA) to 1) update andbroaden our current understanding of wildlifelinkage areas in the U.S. Northern Rockies; 2)determine the highest priority habitat connectionsin the U.S. Northern Rockies so that wecan apply our resources towards conservationof those linkage areas; and 3) provide informationto our conservation partners. This assessmentfocused on the movement needs of wideranging carnivore species (grizzly bear, wolf,wolverine and lynx) and wide-ranging ungulatespecies (elk, moose, pronghorn, and bighornsheep), although additional information aboutother locally-significant species was also collected.AWL has conducted this assessmentin all four of our conservation areas (Figure2)—the Cabinet-Purcell, Crown, Hub, and HighDivide.The Priority Linkage Assessment is an expertopiniondriven model that captures the extensivefield knowledge and wildlife movementinformation of biologists in the region’s linkageareas, coupled with a literature review ofpeer-reviewed habitat connectivity models andresearch papers addressing wildlife linkage.Based on the expert opinion of the nearly 100state, tribal, independent and federal biologistswe interviewed in the four conservation areasstudied, American Wildlands identified criticalhabitat linkage at multiple scales, as well asthe threats to, and opportunities for, conservingthese wildlife linkage areas. Within each conservationarea we assessed, biologists identifiedlinkage areas of varying size. In some cases, wecombined small linkage areas, or “sublinkages”into a linkage area. The result is that we createdeasy-to-read GIS maps of the identifiedlinkage areas that can have nested sets of finerscaledata embedded within them.Figure 2. American WildlandsNorthern Rockies ConservationAreas19