The Service's Draft Guidance for Selecting Species for Design of Landscape-scale Conservation was released in July 2012 to provide guidance for directing Strategic Habitat Conservation towards achieving and maintaining functional landscapes. Beginning in the summer of 2012,scientists and managers from 3 Klamath field offices, the Klamath NWR complex, and the Pacific Southwest regional office came together to define conservation objectives for a functional landscape in the Klamath River watershed and to pilot a surrogate species selection process using Structured Decision Making. Our approach was to select surrogate species that represent key physical and ecological conditions and processes, which in turn collectively support functional species assemblages. Our goal was to use surrogate species to guide our work and provide a measure of progress toward objectives in our conservation objective hierarchy within a scalable and transparent framework. We will describe our approach and methods for this pilot effort as we continue to work towards a comprehensive strategy for landscape scale conservation in the Klamath River Watershed.
