HELENA, Mont. – One of the key threats facing wildlife today is its ability to move.
But efforts to protect safe migration corridors are gaining steam around the world.
Jodi Hilty is co-editor of "Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation," which comes out Tuesday with its second edition.
Hilty also is president and chief scientist for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, which is one of the most intact mountain regions in the world.
She says the conservation world is realizing that connecting habitats is integral for both plant and animal species.
"Those isolated islands of habitat are more likely to lose species,” she states. “So it's really a matter of making sure that we both protect big enough core areas and that we also are able to maintain the opportunity for movement between fragments of habitat that are left."
As an example, Hilty cites the grizzly bear, which used to have a habitat that expanded to the Mexican border but now only lives in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in the United States.
She says those bears face the threat of dying off without connection to more grizzlies to the north.
Hilty notes that the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has helped double the amount of protected areas in the region since its creation in 1993 and says countries around the world are protecting wildlife corridors.
"The discussion is starting to move from just thinking about protected areas as the solutions for conserving all of our biodiversity to thinking about large landscape conservation, thinking about what protected areas we need, where they're placed and how we connect them so that they can function as a better system," she points out.
The newest edition of "Corridor Ecology" also includes discussion of climate change's effect on migrating species.
Hilty says numerous studies have shown the range for species of all kinds have started to shift because of climate change, but they can butt up against human development, making it hard for them to survive.
She says that makes the mission of connecting landscapes even more important.
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Washington lawmakers have created a new Prescribed Burn Liability Fund to help make controlled burns less risky on public, private and tribal lands across the state.
Advocates said low-intensity fires, which clear dead vegetation and small trees, are among the best tools to reduce wildfire severity but fears of runaway fires have limited their use.
Cody Desautel, executive director of the Colville Tribes, helped write the bill to create the fund. He said although there is risk, data from the Forest Service and other agencies show controlled burns are very safe.
"They pull off 99.84% of their burns within prescription within the planned footprint," Desautel pointed out. "The risk of it is really low but for the rare occurrences you see it, the cost can be fairly high."
Desautel noted a century of fire suppression has increased burnable materials in forests, causing more intense wildfires.
Indigenous people have practiced controlled burns for millennia, Desautel added, to both prevent fires and promote plant growth. To reduce wildfire damage, he argued the state needs a new approach.
"We're going to have to shift our perspective, how we deal with fire, how we create fire resilience," Desautel urged. "It has to be suppression in combination with fuels and forest health treatments that makes fires easier to manage."
Rep. Adam Bernbaum, D-Port Angeles, sponsored the bill to create the liability fund. He said when fires are bigger and harder to control, along with loss of life and property, it can also make things more expensive for communities living close to forest land.
"The rising property insurance rates there make it challenging for low-income, middle-income people across the state," Bernbaum observed.
Bernbaum hopes the new policy will help bring down insurance rates for homeowners and encourage more people to get certified to implement prescribed burns. He added the fund should be up and running by the beginning of 2026.
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The sale of public lands along with a rollback of protections for national monuments is back on the table now that Republicans control both houses of Congress.
During his first term, President Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried to reduce the size of national monuments in Utah and Nevada. The Washington Post set off alarm bells last month after it reported that New Mexico's Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks is among the six national monuments the Trump administration is considering for energy development.
Mark Allison, executive director of New Mexico Wild, said it is a complicated issue.
"We see attempts through the courts, the House rules process, through budget reconciliation and even federal legislation where they're trying to either turn what are public lands over to states or actually directly privatize them and sell them off to the highest bidder," he explained.
That came to pass last week when the House Natural Resources Committee passed legislation to sell or transfer 460,000 acres of federal lands in Nevada and Utah to local governments or private entities.
In the 2025 State of the Rockies survey, 72% of residents polled in eight Western states said they would prefer their member of Congress emphasize protecting clean air, water and wildlife habitat while boosting outdoor recreation over maximizing the amount of public land used for oil and gas drilling.
That was a 2% increase from the year before. But Allison fears public sentiment consistently expressed in the annual Colorado College poll could be ignored.
"If this comes, we want to be ready to have just an overwhelming and immediate response to tell the administration that we stand by our monuments in New Mexico and don't want to see them harmed," he added.
In the final days of his administration, President Joe Biden designated more than 600,000 acres of desert east of California's Coachella Valley as the Chuckwalla National Monument. But a Texas-based group has filed a lawsuit to stop the designation, arguing the president overstepped his authority.
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By Nina B. Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
On March 10, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources received two phone calls. One caller phoned to complain that manure runoff was entering a tributary of Dry Run Creek, a waterway that provides vital habitat for fish and other wildlife in Winneshiek County, Iowa. The other caller described dead fish downstream. A few days later on March 13, the DNR reported the manure spill but did not name its source. Sentient has now obtained records from the Iowa DNR that show the source is an Iowa dairy operation — the Dale Humpal Dairy — located near an animal feeding operation run by another individual — Darryl Humpal — whose own operation has been fined multiple times for manure spill violations. Both operations have each received approximately $2 million in federal subsidies.
This particular manure spill caused a 10.2 mile-long fish-kill — one of the largest documented kills to occur in Iowa in the last decade.
In the Department’s field report, DNR officials observed “several dead fish” and “a strong odor of manure.” The report continues, “fish appeared to have recently died and they had not deteriorated yet.” In a letter to a DNR district supervisor, a natural resource technician describes, “freshly dead fish with some stranded gasping for air, manure on top of ice, and dirty flowing water below ice…”
More than 100,000 dead fish were observed by the investigators, whose subsequent water tests revealed lethal levels of ammonia. According to an evaluation of Dale Humpal Dairy’s manure storage facility on March 12, a faulty manure control structure had been “noted during previous inspections.”
Lactating dairy cows produce 150 pounds of manure per day. Dairy operations produce a lot of manure — more than poultry farms or beef — and that manure can wreak havoc on the environment in a number of ways. In addition to water pollution, livestock manure management is responsible for around 9 percent of methane emissions in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
As part of its investigation, on March 11 DNR officials paid a visit to Dale Humpal Dairy, where the manure appeared to be originating. Dale Humpal, the apparent operator who is listed as a member of the Iowa State Dairy Association Board, was nowhere to be found that day.
According to DNR documentation, Dale Humpal Dairy is a 330-head dairy with 50-60 heifers, and 15 calves “in huts,” the small structures where individual calves are typically kept on industrial dairy operations. The documents refer to the dairy as an animal feeding operation, which the EPA defines as an agricultural operation where animals are raised in confinement. In one of the photos Sentient obtained, cows can be seen crammed in a large shed with just enough room at the bottom to poke their heads out for air.
On March 12, the DNR was able to make contact with Humpal, who told the DNR he was not aware of any manure overflowing from his operation. As the DNR official continued to test for ammonia downstream (with some samples testing as high as 23 parts per million), they ultimately came to their conclusion that the dairy was the source, and on March 31 called Humpal with the results.
“I stated to him that my investigation was concluded and it was determined that the runoff from his open lots caused manure to flow into the tile intake,” the official wrote, referring to the soil drainage system prevalent in Iowa farmland.
In 2017, a manure spill attributed to the animal feeding operation owned by Darryl Humpal — located near Dale Humpal Dairy — killed 34,486 fish in Dry Run Creek.
Water pollution continues to afflict Iowa amid a steady increase of farm animals in the state. The overwhelming majority — 99 percent — of farmed animals in the U.S. are raised in factory farms. In Iowa, there are almost 124 million farm animals at any given time — around 55 million chickens, 53.4 million hogs, 11.5 million turkeys, and 3.7 million cattle and cows. In Iowa, manure spills are commonplace: a recent report by Food and Water Watch found that from 2013 to 2023, there were 179 documented manure spills that killed almost 2 million fish.
Dale Humpal did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources did not respond regarding what penalties it will be pursuing as a result of the violations.
Nina B. Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.
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