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Channeled Scablands Spring Waterfowl Surveys, Study Report Published in 2025
The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington (CSEWA) contain one of the Pacific Flyway’s most undervalued and understudied wetland complexes. This landscape was created thousands of years ago by repeated catastrophic floods from Glacial Lake Missoula, leaving behind an intricate network of tens of thousands of basins. Today, these wetlands provide vital staging and foraging habitats…
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Patrick Donnelly’s Greatest Hits at the IWJV
Patrick Donnelly’s Greatest Hits at the IWJV Hired in 2011, Patrick Donnelly was one of the first few employees that Coordinator Dave Smith hired at the Intermountain West Joint Venture. At the time, spatial analysis of landscape change was still an emerging technology due to new access to satellite imagery. Thinking back across the past…
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Going, going, gone: Landscape drying reduces wetland function across the American West
Q&A Going, going, gone: Landscape drying reduces wetland function across the American West Q&A with Lead Author Patrick Donnelly In a paper published in the journal Ecological Indicators, IWJV and partner scientists take a regional look at a drying trend that is impairing wetland habitat across the West. Lead author and former IWJV Spatial Ecologist…
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Klamath Basin Farming and Wetland Collaborative Regional Conservation Partnership Program
The Klamath Basin’s wetlands historically provided an abundance of important year-round habitat for waterfowl and waterbirds. Those same wetlands—and the water that feeds them—also sustain fisheries and people, from farmers and ranchers to the tribes who have called this place home for time immemorial. Wetlands were and remain a vital part of the ecosystem; a…
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Giving the Klamath Basin “A Fighting Chance”
The Klamath Basin was once the crown jewel of the Southern Oregon Northeastern California (SONEC) region, supporting sixty percent of the wetland-dependant birds that breed and migrate in the Pacific Flyway. This area once contained more than 450,000 acres of wetland habitat and supported robust populations of fish and wildlife species throughout the watershed, from…
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Video: One Minute of Migratory Bird Zen
Late October is the height of autumnal waterfowl migration in the Klamath Basin. The wetlands of this landscape have long supported the ducks and geese of the Pacific Flyway as they wing southward in the fall, and again as they head to their northern breeding grounds in the spring. Once referred to as “the Everglades…
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Restoring Satus Wildlife Area
Tucked away on the banks of the Yakima River is a series of old oxbows and side channels where Cascadian snowmelt spreads out and slows down during spring’s floods. From a distance, this spot is only marked by the canopies of giant cottonwoods poking above the rows of corn and hops for which this watershed…
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Intermountain Insights: Wetland Loss in the Pacific Flyway
A study from the Intermountain West Joint Venture and partners, Functional wetland loss drives emerging risks to waterbird migration networks, identified trends of severe wetland drying in the Southern Oregon Northeastern California (SONEC) region and California’s Central Valley, two of the most significant sites for migratory waterbirds in the Pacific Flyway. The good news? Managers can…
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The Solution Seekers: Conservation in the Middle Rio Grande
The water crisis in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley is a microcosm of long-term drought playing out across the West. So, too, are the ways in which people are coming together to meet conservation challenges head-on. Climate change means New Mexico and much of the West face a drier and hotter future. Increasingly scarce…
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NRCS Practices for Connecting Landscapes
Although fencelines often divide the landscapes of the Intermountain West, water and wildlife do not abide by those boundaries. Conservation of these important resources relies on an understanding of landscape-scale connectivity. This visual representation of various practices used by USDA NRCS on private agricultural land and public land leased for agriculture seeks to create dialogue…
