Strategic Plan for the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program - Habitat Restoration Division Pacific Southwest Region. Fiscal years 2022-2026

Pacific Southwest Region: Partners Program Strategic Plan 2022-2026

This strategic plan provides a vision, strategy, and accountability for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program (Partners Program; the Program) in the Pacific Southwest Region for fiscal years 2022-2026. The Partners Program was established to provide habitat restoration projects on privately owned lands to advance the Service’s conservation efforts. Its mission is: “to restore, protect, and enhance fish and wildlife habitat cooperatively through voluntary partnerships with private landowners, Tribes, and other entities”. The Service strives to implement science-based, sustainable, and economically viable habitat restoration projects through the Partners Program.

This document represents the fourth version of strategic plans for the Partners Program in this region. It builds on previous successes while modernizing and coalescing the Program. For this revision, we used the widely accepted Conservation Standards Practice aligning Program goals with the Service’s overall mission and conservation needs across the Region’s geography. This method enabled us to apply a set of principles, practices, and terminology that advanced program planning to include prioritized targets and situation models for the conservation concerns across the Region. Our use of Conservation Standards will enable a more formal integration of a Strategic Habitat Conservation-based (SHC) approach into Region-wide program operations. These changes add an additional layer of scientific rigor allowing a more comprehensive adaptive management approach at both the project- and landscape conservation scales.