Our Stories

The BLM Fort Ord National Monument provides an excellent outdoor classroom for environmental education and scientific research. Each year hundreds of school students from around the Monterey Peninsula visit BLM lands for science projects or for special field trips focusing on soil erosion, wetland ecology, or habitat restoration.

Last year Ryan McConnell, an AmeriCorps Volunteer in Service to America (or VISTA) intern, helped local students learning English as a second language connect with nature through education and stewardship programs at McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area. The BLM and partner group Colorado Canyons Association sponsored Ryan and turned McInnis Canyons into an outdoor classroom with the help of a Hands on the Land grant from the National Environmental Education Foundation. They partnered with the Dual Immersion Academy, a public charter school in Grand Junction, Colo., and its new STEM program to start the program.

Interns are a valuable resource to the BLM, and there is no better example than Magdalena Gudino, who attends California State University in Sacramento. As part of her recent internship, Magdalena helped conduct studies on ponds at the Cosumnes River Preserve affected by the methylation of mercury, documented the location of invasive plant species, and monitored the preserve’s pond water levels.

An invasive marine invertebrate known as “marine vomit,” that can smother native species has been found within Whiting Harbor in Sitka. This non-native carpet sea squirt, Didemnum vexillum, (D. vex) is thought to be native to Japan. It was first detected in Whiting Harbor in 2010 as a result of a citizen-science-marine invasive species bioblitz. Tammy Davis, Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), invasive species program lead, was concerned along with other stakeholders including local Sitkans and those who work in the marine invasive species world, about the discovery and potential growth and spread of D. vex in Whiting Harbor.

While BLM Alaska’s Seeds of Success works with several others to collect and promote the use of native seeds, a big helping hand comes from interns from the Chicago Botanical Garden Conservation Land Management Intern program.

For some Americans, sagebrush is so ubiquitous it is forgotten — always in the background of the classic Westerns but somehow never looked at. Until now. Millions of acres of sagebrush land, managed mostly by the federal government because nobody else originally wanted it, have become a target for the largest, most ambitious habitat conservation effort in American history.

The BLM Colorado Northwest District fisheries program is working closely with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to help bolster populations of the native Bluehead Sucker in the Yampa River Basin. Last summer the BLM helped CPW stock 5,000 Bluehead Suckers implanted with small electronic tags into Milk Creek, a tributary of the Yampa River located in the Little Snake Field Office. Biologists then deployed several small devices that can collect data from the tagged fish that swim near them.        

The blunt-nosed leopard lizard is the poster child for the San Joaquin desert grassland habitat. This fast running lizard that can leap more than 23 inches to escape predators and catch prey! As an Endangered Species, scientists are actively working to put the blunt-nosed leopard lizard on the path to recovery. The timing the 2012-2014 drought facilitated a study by the BLM, University of California, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and The Nature Conservancy to assess the potential effects of climate change on blunt-nosed leopard lizard.

The announcement that the greater sage-grouse will not be listed as threatened or endangered was welcome news for a northeast California team hard at work on the species, but it will not slow down their ongoing work to find collaborative approaches to conserving the sagebrush sea.

While the BLM manages millions of acres of rangeland for cattle, sheep, and other livestock ranchers in the West, in Alaska it is Alaska Native reindeer herders who are served by the grazing progra

At the Agua Fria National Monument, in the Horseshoe Grazing Allotment, where one of the most important multiple-use missions takes place: livestock grazing.