Members of the Western Governors’ Association Working Lands Roundtable met virtually this week to examine cross-jurisdictional cooperation in natural resources management and the roll of non-state, non-federal organizations.

The Roundtable serves multiple functions and has been especially successful in facilitating and inspiring creative conversations among land managers, conservationists, resource professionals, academicians and public officials, Jim Ogsbury, WGA executive director, said in a webinar on Oct. 21.

“They use the roundtable as a platform to design strategies for enhancing the resiliency of western working landscapes and the communities they support,” he said.

In its short life, the roundtable has accomplished a great deal including implementing WGA’s shared stewardship agreement with USDA and pursuing campaigns on post-fire restoration, cheatgrass control and vegetation management, he said.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little, vice chairman of WGA, said natural resources management only works if people participate.

“Good resource management in the West requires that people are not disenfranchised because they don’t have a voice in how we manage the federal lands,” he said.

There have always been conflicting interests when it comes to natural resources, he said.

“And there’s nothing wrong with that. If you have a shared goal of where you want to be, that really helps that collaborative work,” he said.

What happens on the soil, in the water and with vegetation builds resilient watersheds, healthy communities and great wildlife populations, he said.

Wildfires have been terrible this year, but the issue has brought a lot of people to the table. And they recognize the importance of wildlife management, vegetation management, collaborative conservation, controlling invasive species and having reliable data, he said.

The focus is on identifying the next susceptible point for a catastrophic wildfire and what to do about it, he said.

“And there’s a lot of good work going forward. It’s a bit of a tragedy … that a lot of those actions have to have such a triggering event as a catastrophic wildfire,” he said.

But it’s a rallying cry for preventing those fires, and a lot of the things WGA’s Working Lands Roundtable addresses is in that realm, he said.

One is WGA’s shared stewardship agreement with USDA to collaboratively improve forest health. Through that initiative, Idaho and USDA will work with stakeholders to reduce fuels and wildfire risk to communities and improve forest health and resiliency.

“We’re proud in Idaho what’s taking place there and the fact that it is a collaborative effort,” he said.

Conservation and wildlife groups, loggers, ranchers and the local recreation community are all involved in solutions and the planning that needs to take place to more efficiently manage forest health and minimize large, disruptive fires, he said.

That’s just one way Idaho is collaboratively addressing wildfires. Collaboration isn’t an easy process, but it adds resilience, momentum and velocity to do other things that are needed, he said.

As the crisis of catastrophic fires continues to ravage the West, these tools and WGA’s initiative are going to be even more important going forward, he said.