New England Cottontail Focus Areas

The New England cottontail (Sylvilagus transitionalis) has experienced significant declines throughout its historical range. Beginning in 2008, state wildlife agencies, the Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the Department of the Interior's United States Fish and Wildlife Service, with substantial coordination support from the Wildlife Management Institute, several universites and other conservation partners, formalized a conservation effort to improve the species status. Coordinated planning by this partnership led to the development of the "Conservation Strategy for the New England Cottontail" (Fuller and Tur 2012, updated 2017 and available at [www.newenglandcottontail.org]). This polygon shapefile delimits the priority conservation Focus Areas identified by the partnership and are further described in the State Conservation Summaries chapter of the Conservation Strategy. The chapter assesses the capability of the land and the feasibility of our strategy to conserve the New England cottontail in the six states that make up today’s NEC range. Conservation professionals have identified target levels for specific elements of reserve design in each focus area in their state, including the distance between habitat patches, and have characterized the sizes of parcels, including both naturally occurring and managed patches, that offer the best opportunities to manage habitat for NEC. Detailed spatially explicit reserve design is not within the scope of this Strategy. (Spatially explicit reserve design and corresponding business plan is described under objective 309 and was completed by the Focus Area Status Screening Template exercise.) We recognize that not all focus areas provide good opportunities to restore populations of NEC. We assume in our planning that restoration will not succeed in all focus areas: Our regional goals do not require uniform success across each and every focus area. We recognize that at the local focus-area scale, some goals are not realistic. While we have provided objective statistics in the state summaries to help managers weigh their priorities, we understand that the decision to forgo restoring any particular NEC population must be a local one. In the future, areas with relatively low human population densities may offer the best opportunities for restoring NEC habitat; however, we believe that the feasibility of safeguarding and restoring existing NEC populations needs further on-the-ground evaluation before shifting our efforts to areas not currently occupied by NEC. The NEC Technical Committee recognizes that new information will likely cause us to change our original focus area boundaries. As new information emerges, we will review proposed changes or new focus areas on an annual basis and modify existing focus areas as needed (see objective 005). As shown in Table 3.1.1 of the Conservation Strategy, recovery goals are not evenly allocated across the six states. According to Fuller et al. (2011), across four modeling approaches and many model iterations, snow depth and canopy cover were consistently among the most important 4 out of 16 habitat variables considered. According to the models, appropriate snow depth and forest canopy cover occur most abundantly in southern New England. The modeled habitat pattern is consistent with the pattern of extant NEC populations, recent NEC declines in Maine and New Hampshire, large expanses of well-documented habitat, and the history of land use in southern New England compared to northern New England. Accordingly, habitat and population goals are higher for states in southern New England. The NEC is presumed to be extirpated from Vermont. At this time there are no plans to reintroduce the species the state, so no conservation actions are proposed. We believe that the geographic scope of the existing Strategy and its goals and objectives will sufficiently improve the conservation status of the NEC. Nevertheless, if NEC should be rediscovered in Vermont or a reintroduction effort be initiated there, we will evaluate the need to develop goals and objectives in partnership with that state’s wildlife agency. The delineation of focus areas is rooted in habitat models and an analysis of land parcels across New England. It guides the design of a landscape for conserving NEC on the broadest scale: a map of the configuration of landscapes that may conserve the species. Focus areas provide general direction for conservation actions to regions with fitting opportunities. Decisions about on-the-ground expenditures of conservation funding should be driven by site-specific assessments and not simply by remote-analysis data or focus area boundaries. The information in the following state summaries is not intended to be used for comparing or establishing a priority ranking of the focus areas or state-based conservation efforts. This polygon shapefile, or any subsequent updated file is available in the Resources section at www.newenglandcottontail.org