Friday, Nov. 15, 2024 | 3:15 p.m.
A conservation agreement aimed at reducing the risk and impact of catastrophic wildfires in Nevada has been extended.
The Nevada Shared Stewardship Agreement offers jurisdictional cooperation, education and land management across Nevada to protect and restore landscapes while reducing the risk and impact of wildfires. It was originally signed in 2019.
“The first thought is how (a community) is going to pay for it,” Gov. Joe Lombardo said at a signing ceremony in Red Rock Canyon. “It has an effect on how we provide resources, on how we respond and how we recover…the shared stewardship fixes that.”
Nevada was the ninth shared stewardship agreement across the county and the first to include non-USDA federal partners, said Mary Farnsworth, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service intermountain regional forester. Under the initial agreement, agencies involved looked at wildfire risk, shared values and opportunities for collaboration and identified 13 landscapes to focus on in Nevada.
“For many, many years we have been doing our piece all over the place,” Farnsworth said. “By focusing together we’re able to really focus the work and make it effective.”
Nevada benefited from investments from the U.S. Forest Service including landscape restoration, program projects, wildfire crisis strategies and community dependent defense grants, Farnsworth said. Sierra County in California and Elko County were identified as wildfire crisis strategy landscapes and received $85 million to reduce the risk of wildfires.
The agreement addresses challenges with erosion from wildfires, invasive species, like Cheatgrass in Northern Nevada and Red Brome in Southern Nevada, and fire recovery at a local, state and national scale, said Jon Ramby, state director at Bureau of Land Management.
Places like Red Rock Canyon are sacred places to tribes across the state, said Vice Chairman Chris Spotted Eagle of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe. Not only to the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe but tribes around Colorado and surrounding states.
“You’re actually seeing the first land managers, which was us,” Spotted Eagle said. “It’s very cool to see how things have evolved and changed…there’s more inclusiveness with tribes throughout the state.”
The Red Rock Conservation Area received 3.6 million visitors in 2024, Ramby, said. That is similar to the number of visitors at Yellowstone National Park. As a result of the stewardship agreement signed in 2019, agencies treated over 295,000 acres in 2024.
“We have to do our work together and it has to cross jurisdictional lines,” Ramby said. “We’ll continue the same vigor and effort that we’ve been doing.”
When the U.S. Forest Service launched shared stewardship agreements across landscapes in 2019, they realized they can’t do it alone, Farnsworth said. They could not handle wildfires effectively just by looking at national forest lands.
“Shared stewardship is a way of being, a way of acting (and) and a way of delivering,” Farnsworth said. “It’s not just the agreement… it’s how we’re working together to deliver the work on the ground.”
The agreement is a model for how to manage large landscape-level risks of wildfires, said Kaylee Allen, senior advisor for resources at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Pacific Southwest Region.
In 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received $50 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for sagebrush conservation efforts, Allen said. Over the last four years, the service allocated $4.5 million across 33 projects in Nevada and Eastern California to restore up to 20,000 acres of land and 20 miles of stream habitat.
In 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other partners recognized the need for more effective restoration for rangelands, Allen said. Together, they created the Nevada Seed Partnership to keep Nevada lands diverse and functioning using appropriate seed restoration for native plants.
“These and other efforts further the capacity to restore healthy, resilient landscapes across Nevada,” Allen said.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service has empowered people through voluntary conservation for the last eight years, said Heidi Ramsey, state conservationist at Natural Resources Conservation Service. They help producers make investments and local communities in Nevada to sustain working, private and public lands.
Natural Resources Conservation Service worked on a shared stewardship agreement, but this is the first time they join as a signatory, Ramsey said. They hope to bring their technical expertise and financial resources to work with state and federal partners.
“We are grateful to be part of this stewardship’s success,” Ramsey said. “I personally am committed to working together to implement projects that will do the right work, in the right places and at the right scale.”