Where is the Wildlife? Improving Key Aquatic Habitats in the Updated Utah Wildlife Action Plan

by Diane Menuz and Pete Goodwin

The Utah Wildlife Action Plan (UWAP) identifies species in need of conservation attention in Utah, their essential habitats, and strategies for addressing threats to their survival (https://wildlife.utah.gov/wildlife-action-plan.html). The UWAP is important for prioritizing restoration and conservation actions and is often used to demonstrate restoration project funding needs. By following the strategies in the UWAP, the State of Utah can help preserve plant and wildlife populations, help prevent new species from being listed under the Endangered Species Act, and reduce the need for the federal regulatory oversight that occurs when species are listed as threatened or endangered. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) revises the plan every 10 years in collaboration with a broad coalition of conservation partners. The UWAP is currently under revision, with the updated plan scheduled for completion by late 2025.

Shallowly flooded mudflat at a privately owned duck club near Bear River Bay of Great Salt Lake. Millions of birds depend on mudflats and other wetland habitat on the shores of Great Salt Lake to support migration and breeding.

The Utah Geological Survey (UGS) is participating in a UWAP committee to improve how “key” aquatic habitats are represented in the plan, including serving as the committee co-chair. Key habitats are those that are essential to the conservation of rare and declining species. The 2015 UWAP relied entirely on data from the National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) to identify aquatic habitats. NWI is a nationwide spatial dataset overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that maps the location and types of wetlands, streams, lakes, and ponds across the nation. The aquatic habitat committee is addressing two major issues with how aquatic habitats were selected in the 2015 UWAP. First, some important Utah habitats, including riparian areas, springs, and critically important mudflats near Great Salt Lake, were not included because they were not well represented in the NWI data or did not score highly enough in a ranking rubric developed for terrestrial habitats. Second, the 2015 UWAP adopted aquatic resource terms directly from NWI, so habitats were defined by technical terms such as “Emergent” and “Riverine” rather than common terms like wet meadow and stream.

Comparison of old (left) versus new (right) NWI mapping along the Provo River downstream from Jordanelle Reservoir in Wasatch County, using imagery from 1981 and 2021, respectively. Both panels are underlain with imagery from 2021. The new mapping data captures the bends in the Provo River and ponds that serve as important breeding habitat for Columbia spotted frogs.

A Columbia spotted frog in wetlands along the Provo River near Woodland, Utah. This species is listed as a species in need of conservation attention in the UWAP because of concern over threats such as loss of riparian vegetation, drought, and competition with nonnative species.

The UWAP aquatic habitat committee adopted a new and much simpler approach for identifying key aquatic habitats for the 2025 plan. All aquatic habitats will be considered key without the need for a ranking rubric, in recognition of the critical importance of water in arid states like Utah. Additionally, key aquatic habitats will be defined using terminology much more familiar to conservation and restoration practitioners. The committee identified five key habitats for the new 2025 UWAP: 1) rivers and streams, 2) lakes and reservoirs, 3) wetlands, 4) springs, and 5) saline lakes, represented by the entire Great Salt Lake ecosystem. Riparian habitat—areas adjacent to streams and lakes with distinct vegetation that are not wet enough to qualify as wetland—are included as a key terrestrial habitat. While components of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem overlap with other habitat categories (e.g., lakes, wetlands), the committee decided to highlight saline lakes in recognition of the importance of these systems for wildlife and the growing momentum to preserve these systems across the West.

The UGS has played a major role in improving the accuracy of some of the spatial layers used to identify key aquatic habitats in the UWAP, particularly the NWI data. When the last UWAP was published in 2015, more than 92% of the state had NWI data that was at least 10 years old and much of the data were over 30 years old. In recent years, the UGS has updated NWI data in rapidly urbanizing areas of the state including Cache and Utah Valleys, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has invested substantially in updating NWI mapping on BLM land throughout the West. Thanks to these efforts, by 2025, more than 60% of the state will have NWI data mapped using imagery from 2015 or later and using modern technology and mapping standards. UGS lead wetlands mapper Pete Goodwin coordinates regular meetings between organizations mapping in the West to foster consistent mapping across all project areas, share current methods and data sources, and promote use of updated wetland mapping datasets.

Springhead pool near The Meadows shopping complex in American Fork, Utah. The SSI dataset includes this spring but identifies the location as nearly 500 feet west of the true point of emergence. The new UGS dataset includes this spring and several others not included in the SSI, state or federal datasets mapped to the best identifiable point of emergence.

The newest NWI mapping data has several improvements over the older versions. Mappers have access to higher resolution imagery which allows them to more accurately capture features as small as 0.1 acres, whereas older mapping excluded any features smaller than 0.5 acres. Drier riparian areas are now mapped alongside wetlands and other aquatic features. And, mappers are classifying wetlands with additional attributes that highlight critical features like connectivity between wetlands, major water sources, and the functions that the wetlands provide (see Survey Notes, v. 54, no. 3, p. 4–5).

For our most recent mapping projects, we developed an additional mapping improvement that will benefit another UWAP key aquatic habitat—springs. Springs are incredibly important to wildlife because they provide relatively stable water sources in the driest stretches of the state, and they support many species of mollusks, one of our most threatened species groups. Unfortunately, NWI data do not adequately capture most spring features—small springs are omitted and there is no simple way to identify pointbased springhead locations with wetland polygon data—and other spring datasets available in Utah are incomplete and contain many spatial inaccuracies. In our Provo River (see UGS Open-File Report 755) and Utah Valley mapping projects, we created a set of point features for spring locations simultaneously while we mapped wetland polygons. The new workflow adds minimal extra time to the traditional mapping process while providing valuable new information to wildlife managers and others by accurately mapping spring locations and identifying new springs not included in any dataset. We are currently sharing these data in the Springs Stewardship Institute’s (SSI) Springs Online database (https://springsdata.org) and these data will become part of a new springs database under development by the UDWR.