Lafayette Wildlife Plan

Project Description

Faced with rapid urban development, increased recreational pressure, and loss of wildlife habitat, the City of Lafayette, Colorado turned to Biohabitats for help in developing a Wildlife Management Plan. The purpose of the Plan is to conserve and manage wildlife as stakeholders of open space habitat, and to protect native ecosystems by meeting and balancing the needs of people, vegetation, and wildlife, which Biohabitats was excited to support.

The Biohabitats team, including Wildlife Specialties, LLC, and Dig Studio, began with GIS desktop analysis and community outreach to understand high-level issues and user values. Insights gained supported habitat quality inventories, wildlife surveys, and soil and hydrology descriptions. The final phase was an analysis of data to identify critical wildlife area and connectivity, vulnerability, and risk.

The team collaborated with the City and the Lafayette Open Space Advisory Committee to establish a framework highlighting major threats to wildlife vitality, special status species protection, non-native species management, wildlife and human conflicts, and best management practices. A monitoring and adaptive management approach was incorporated along with a cost estimate.

Information gathered from the ecological assessment can be repeated by the City to track long-term trends in species abundance and inform adaptive management. This project also supports the City’s goal of establishing a technical foundation, prioritizing actions to reduce climate impacts, and responding to changing regional conditions while sustainably protecting wildlife and preserving native habitats.