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Stewardship on America’s private lands

With 70 percent of U.S. lands in private hands and many of our best hunt and fish opportunities occurring there, investing in voluntary conservation on working lands safeguards access, strengthens habitat and water quality, and ensures resilient landscapes.

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by: Dan Morgan

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July 1, 2026

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by: Tristan Henry

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June 30, 2026

Elk Hunting and Forest Planning in Oregon’s Blue Mountains

The ongoing Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision should balance motorized access with active forest management to keep elk on public lands

Wildfire, drought, the health of our forests, and hunter and angler access have been dinner-table conversations for families across the West for decades. These conversations hit even closer to home for those families who feed themselves with elk.

Across more than five million acres of public land in northeast Oregon and southeast Washington, the Forest Service has been working for over 20 years to update the plan that guides how these forests are managed. The agency will soon take public comment on the Blue Mountains Draft Environmental Impact Statement, and the stakes are hard to overstate. These forests hold some of the best public land elk hunting in the West and sustain rural economies. If done right, new management approaches can improve habitat and water quality, breathe life back into rural communities, produce more timber and reduce catastrophic fire on the landscape, and strengthen the fish and wildlife populations that hunters and anglers depend on.

Ranchers, loggers, hunters, and anglers agree this opportunity is real. TRCP and our partners are working to ensure the right management and planning tools are built into the final Blue Mountains plans, which will guide the Malheur, Wallowa-Whitman, and Umatilla National Forests for decades to come. Read more below to learn how you can get involved.

The Science of Elk Habitat

Good hunters understand habitat sets the stage for animal behavior. The availability and quality of food, shelter, and perceived safety dictate big game distribution. Hunters also understand that access matters, but when road networks are too dense and the quiet, quality habitat that elk need shrinks, the animals are forced to search for more appealing country.

As recreational activity has expanded on public land and forests have grown denser due to fire suppression and a lack of active management, herds often head for the quiet side of the fence on private agricultural ground. When elk seek food and/or security on private land, hunters may lose opportunity and landowners suffer crop damage and forage competition. Ultimately, wildlife managers may have to make the difficult choice to cut tag numbers or issue damage permits.

The Starkey Experimental Forest and Range in northeast Oregon has produced some of the most important long-term research on elk behavior and road-based disturbance in the country. Starkey studies have consistently identified open, well-traveled roads as the single most important variable in determining where elk spend their time during hunting season. Rowland and colleagues reported in 2004 that reducing open-road density and creating areas that properly balance motorized access with active management projects improves quality elk habitat that keeps elk on public lands. More recent work at Starkey shows the same holds true for trails. In a controlled study published in 2018, Wisdom and colleagues found that while elk moved away from ATV riders, mountain bikers, hikers, and horseback riders, the strongest response was to motorized use. This pattern holds well beyond the Blue Mountains. Studies of elk herds in Montana have also found that elk consistently move to quieter country that keeps them away from motorized access during archery and rifle seasons.

Critically, the research also points to something every hunter should understand before this plan is finalized. Active management like thinning, prescribed fire, and fuels reduction can dramatically improve the amount and quality of food a landscape provides for elk. But better food only helps if elk are willing to use it. If the surrounding road network keeps them in a constant state of avoidance, the improved habitat goes unused. In other words, restoration work and road management must go hand in hand, or the investment does not deliver what it should.

Forest Planning Sets the Stage for Successful Elk Hunts

Forest plans are the control valve for many of the factors that contribute to robust populations of big game. These plans—developed through public process and shaped by collaboration between state and federal agencies—set the direction that every subsequent decision on the forest has to follow. When that plan includes clear direction on how many open roads a landscape can have and how human disturbance is managed during sensitive seasons, the individual projects like timber sales, habitat restoration, and new roads or trails all have to work toward those same goals. When the plan stays silent on those questions, each project is decided on its own, with no consistent standard.

The Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests in Colorado offer a recent, applicable example. The GMUG’s 2024 final forest plan established more than 800,000 acres of Wildlife Management Areas with route density standards designed to maintain habitat function while allowing for more sustainable recreation and active management. The GMUG plan demonstrates that wildlife habitat management, recreation access and active forest management do not need to be competing objectives. When properly conducted, they can reinforce each other. Standards on the density of roads and trails gives land managers a clear framework for designing projects within the forest that improve both forest health and elk habitat, remove timber where needed, and give the public confidence that restoration investments will translate into wildlife on the ground.

The Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests support one of the largest Rocky Mountain elk herds in the country, and the Starkey Experimental Forest, with its wealth of science to inform habitat management, sits within the planning area. A revision is long overdue, and this is a real opportunity to account for the many ways people use these forests and to update how the plan manages roads in relation to elk habitat. Instead, the draft environmental impact statement recently released by the Forest Service for public comment does not include elk security and road density standards that have guided these forests since 1990, and it does so without putting a modern, science-based replacement in their place. That is a step backward on both counts: it abandons direction that has been in place for 35 years and sets aside the best-available Starkey research.

The Forest Service will soon take public comment on the Blue Mountains Draft Environmental Impact Statement. This is the time for hunters and anglers to weigh in. Comments from those who hunt these mountains are a meaningful contribution to the public process. This is a real chance to usher in a new era of management that better serves the communities that depend on these forests. Stay tuned to TRCP channels for upcoming opportunities for you to take action.

by: Sarah Smith

posted in:

June 29, 2026

Restoring the Rio Grande with Federal Funding: New Mexico

As the first in a three-part series highlighting 2026 project tours in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, TRCP highlights here how stakeholders led Congressional staff on a tour of project work to see firsthand how WaterSMART grants yield on-the-ground impacts to protect water supplies and fish and wildlife habitat in central New Mexico

It’s no secret that Western water supplies are under stress from long-term drought and hotter, drier weather, especially this year. At the same time, federal funding for Western water management and fish and wildlife habitat has been shrinking, creating uncertainty around the ability to address critical water challenges across the West that impact not only sportsmen and women but also millions of people in communities across the region.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART (Sustain and Manage America’s Resources for Tomorrow) program is one of the primary federal funding sources dedicated to addressing Western water management and drought-related challenges.

Over a three-part series, we will take you on a journey through the Rio Grande Basin to explore how this funding source in particular is essential for water security and habitat improvement projects along the iconic Rio Grande. We start our journey in the heart of the river basin: central New Mexico.

Diverse Projects Throughout New Mexico

In late May, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership hosted Congressional offices for a field tour and discussion of WaterSMART-funded projects and watershed management planning documents in New Mexico’s portion of the Rio Grande River Basin. River restoration and conservation organizations, water utilities, agricultural producers, and more who receive funding from WaterSMART programs from across the state convened to present on their projects. These projects ranged from watershed restoration and planning efforts to infrastructure efficiency upgrades and agricultural modernization. The tour included a wide diversity of projects, exhibiting just how versatile this federal funding source is in offering solutions to a myriad of Western water issues.

Habitat restoration is not simply a localized environmental effort, but a basin-wide necessity with far-reaching benefits across the watershed.

The tour began at a riverside beach in Albuquerque to discuss the background of the WaterSMART program, the different funding mechanisms under the program, and the current state of the program. Throughout the day, grantees —including nonprofit organizations, an Indigenous Pueblo, acequia (community-managed irrigation canal) representatives, and more —presented on their WaterSMART-funded projects. These included projects aimed at planning for drought, reducing woody fuels in forested areas to increase wildfire resilience, and scaling up riparian restoration to improve fish and wildlife habitat and stream function.

The group visited the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority Southside Wastewater Reclamation Plant to see a restoration project completed last fall. This project restored riparian and aquatic habitat, reconnected the river to its floodplain within a degraded reach, and improved public access through the creation of riverside trails. While visiting the project site, we saw two young men fishing from the newly restored and stabilized riverbank, an area where the public previously lacked safe access to the river or opportunities to enjoy activities such as fishing.

Partners supporting the New Mexico tour were numerous and included:

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Audubon Southwest
World Wildlife Fund
Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District
Albuquerque-Bernalillo Water Utility Authority
Pueblo of Acoma
New Mexico Acequia Association
Chama Peak Land Alliance
Santa Fe Watershed Association

Lasting Impressions

Staff from four of New Mexico’s five U.S. Senate and House offices were present during the tour, and more than one shared that the experience gave them a deeper understanding of the WaterSMART program after seeing firsthand the range of projects it supports across the state.

The WaterSMART program has seen an approximately 70% reduction in funding between 2025 and 2026.

Attendees remarked that what resonated most was how interconnected the work across the Rio Grande Basin truly is, and how actions like fuels reduction and streambank restoration projects in the headwaters of northern New Mexico can improve the quantity and quality of water flowing to communities far downstream to the south. Indeed, investments in both infrastructure and habitat restoration throughout the watershed benefit the entire river system and all who rely on the Rio Grande, from hunters and anglers to cities to agricultural producers. Habitat restoration is not simply a localized environmental effort, but a basin-wide necessity with far-reaching benefits across the watershed.

An Invaluable Funding Source

With the Rio Grande as a backdrop, the TRCP explained to tour attendees that the WaterSMART program has seen an approximately 70% reduction in funding between 2025 and 2026 and currently faces additional cuts and program changes in the draft 2027 federal appropriations bill. Notably, the WaterSMART Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Program, which focuses on improving the health of fisheries, wildlife, and aquatic habitat, is facing total elimination.

The WaterSMART program is widely successful across the West, having funded 2,144 projects and 270 planning documents totaling over $12.1 billion – achievements that would otherwise not be attainable for states. One grantee noted that “projects like these…have incredible societal, economic, and environmental benefits, but are often outside the budgetary constraints of small and rural communities.” This is true for larger, municipal entities, too. While states often provide matching funds for accessing these dollars, the federal investment is often necessary for enabling these “big ticket” projects.

In the weeks following the tour, the Bureau of Reclamation has released a number of Notices of Funding Opportunity for various WaterSMART programs, including those that support drought response activities, watershed planning, and infrastructure efficiency upgrades. The TRCP is encouraged to see agency efforts to continue the program with previous-year funding despite the fact that future funding remains uncertain.

Although our group thankfully timed the tour perfectly to see water actually flowing through the riverbed, the Rio Grande went dry through Albuquerque just a couple of days later and is expected to remain barren until summer rains arrive. This is a stark reminder of the dire situation this river, and others throughout the Southwest, are facing. Federal investments in programs like WaterSMART can continue helping communities plan and implement actions to better manage water supplies and improve fish and wildlife habitat for current and future generations.

To learn more about the TRCP’s efforts to ensure WaterSMART receives continued funding to tackle Western water challenges, and to help support this effort, see a related Action Alert . And stay tuned for parts two and three of our Restoring the Rio Grande with Federal Funding blog series: next up, we will take you to the headwaters of the Rio Grande in Colorado, before a visit to its terminus in South Texas.

by: Josh Metten

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Wyoming Sportspeople Applaud Sublette Pronghorn Antelope Migration Corridor Designation

State action a crucial step in conserving the world’s longest known pronghorn migration

Last week, Governor Mark Gordon formally designated the Sublette antelope corridor using Migration Corridor Executive Order 2020-1. Speaking at the Trappers Point wildlife overpass where thousands of pronghorn antelope migrate annually, Governor Gordon emphasized that durable conservation is built from the ground up and that Wyoming’s collaborative, locally led approach to corridor conservation will benefit future generations.

This action is the culmination of over 20 years of Wyoming-led research, policy development, and stakeholder engagement. In 2020, Governor Gordon signed Executive Order 2020-1, giving Wyoming a state-led tool to manage for the intactness and viability of its big game migration corridors amid growing development pressure. This step prioritizes conservation of the corridor’s most sensitive habitats by directing development away from bottlenecks, limiting development in high use and stopover areas, and minimizing impacts throughout the corridor.

“Wyoming is the epicenter of pronghorn hunting, and with the longest migration and largest population in the world, the Sublette herd is globally renowned,” said Josh Metten, Wyoming field manager for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “The Governor’s action to prioritize the conservation of this incredible resource is only fitting. Thank you, Governor Gordon.”

In early 2026, the proposed corridor received a formal review by a local working group comprised of representatives from the energy and mining industries as well as agriculture, motorized recreation, conservation, and county commissions. In addition to supporting the management safeguards now afforded to the most sensitive areas of the corridor, the group also emphasized the importance of strong state policy paired with voluntary private land conservation.

“The Sublette antelope corridor designation is a historic milestone that shows what happens when Wyomingites work together to build durable, state-led policy that supports our wildlife and way of life,” said Metten. “Hunters and anglers appreciate the leadership of Governor Gordon, Deputy Policy Director Sara DiRienzo, the local working group, and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. We look forward to building on Wyoming’s legacy to ensure that our incredible migrations and hunting heritage endure for generations.”

Learn more about TRCP’s commitment to big game migration HERE.

The TRCP is your resource for all things conservation. In our weekly Roosevelt Report, you’ll receive the latest news on emerging habitat threats, legislation and proposals on the move, public land access solutions we’re spearheading, and opportunities for hunters and anglers to take action. Sign up now.

by: Noah Davis

posted in:

June 26, 2026

In the Arena: Angelo Paez

TRCP’s “In the Arena” series highlights the individual voices of hunters and anglers who, as Theodore Roosevelt so famously said, strive valiantly in the worthy cause of conservation.

Angelo Paez

Hometown: Oakland, California
Occupation: Law Enforcement Recruit (Bay Area Rapid Transit)
Conservation credentials: Angelo Paez is a participant in both Outdoor Afro and the Black Heritage Hunt. Paez is part of a growing community dedicated to reconnecting people with the outdoors and with hunting and fishing traditions. He sees that work as essential to building the next generation of conservation advocates. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he knows firsthand the pressures that urban development and habitat fragmentation place on public lands, and he believes that protecting those spaces is inseparable from the sportsman’s responsibility to the land.

Raised in Oakland, California, Angelo Paez dabbled in fishing growing up before attending CSU Monterey Bay where he turned a passing interest into a serious pursuit. In 2021, Rue Mapp and the California Waterfowl Association introduced him to hunting through the Black Heritage Hunt, an experience Paez says rocket-shipped his love for the sport. Now a law enforcement recruit with Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and a dedicated public land hunter, he brings that same drive into conservation: keeping wild places intact so the tradition of hunting and fishing for your own food endures for every generation that follows.

Here is his story.

TRCP: How were you introduced to hunting, fishing, and the outdoors? Who introduced you?

Angelo Paez: I fished off and on growing up, but my passion truly ignited during college at CSU Monterey Bay. My good friend Hunter Isbell and I spent countless hours exploring, experimenting, and learning the local waters.

My introduction to hunting came in 2021 through Rue Mapp and Holly Heyser at the California Waterfowl Association’s Suisun property and more deeply through the Black Heritage Hunt and Outdoor Afro.

Sitting in a duck blind for the first time and watching the birds work was an unforgettable experience. It completely rocket-shipped my love for the sport, sending me down a path of exploring new, wild places, targeting different species, and deeply respecting the outdoor lifestyle.

TRCP: Tell us about one of your most memorable outdoor adventures.

Angelo Paez: Hunting at the Fort Hunter Liggett military base stands out as a true favorite. The sheer scale of the property gives you the ultimate freedom to completely explore and hunt in the raw, untamed wild. What makes it incredibly memorable is the seasonal variety – being able to pursue multiple species on the same massive piece of public land is an absolute rush and an outdoor experience that is hard to match.

**Angelo Paez** with a great catfish ready for the dinner table.

TRCP: If you could hunt or fish anywhere, where would it be and why?

Angelo Paez: I would love to hunt and fish across the rugged wilderness of Alaska. It represents the ultimate frontier for any outdoorsman. The opportunity to chase big game, fish for wild salmon in pristine rivers, and experience a massive landscape that has remained largely untouched by modern development is the dream. It’s the definition of wild, self-reliant adventure.

TRCP: How does conservation help enhance your outdoor life?

Angelo Paez: Conservation ensures that the wild spaces I rely on for food, adventure, and mental clarity actually stay wild. When habitats are properly managed, wildlife populations thrive naturally, which means healthier ecosystems and better harvest opportunities. It directly translates to a more rewarding, high-quality experience every single time I step into the field or cast a line.

TRCP: What are the major conservation challenges where you live?

Angelo Paez: In the crowded San Francisco Bay Area, the biggest challenge is balancing urban development with protecting our local ecosystems and waterways. Urban runoff, habitat fragmentation, and heavy pressure on surrounding public lands threaten the natural balance. Preserving public access while ensuring these high-traffic areas aren’t over-pressured or degraded is a massive uphill battle.

TRCP: Why is it important to you to be involved in conservation?

Angelo Paez: It matters to me because I want to ensure that public properties remain open and viable for people to do exactly what our ancestors did: hunt and fish for their own food. I love seeing the environment thrive in its natural, pure beauty. Being involved means finding the perfect balance between harvesting from nature without causing undue pressure.

TRCP: Why should conservation matter to the next generation of hunters and anglers?

Angelo Paez: If the next generation doesn’t advocate for conservation, the traditions we love will disappear. Public lands are constantly under threat of being lost or degraded. Future hunters and anglers need to realize that being a sportsman isn’t just about the harvest; it’s about being a caretaker of the land so that the generations after them can experience the same freedom and beauty.

Photo credit: Angelo Paez

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