Alaska’s Department of Fish & Game will receive a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for conservation studies of species across the state.
Chris Krenz is the Department’s coordinator with the Threatened, Endangered, and Diversity Program…
Krenz: “There are different species for which there is a large conservation need, so we have a list of about 300 species in which we think there may be some conservation concerns. And that may be just that we don’t know a lot about the species, we work with the Sport Fish Division on these grants as well, maybe something on aquatic animal as well, or it could be that the species is primarily found in Alaska.”
Roughly $100,000 of the grant will go to the Department’s Habitat Division, with one third of the remaining funds going to the Sport Fishing Division and the rest going to Division of Wildlife Conservation.
Krenz says the grant has been used in the past to avoid unnecessary costs to Alaska by putting native animals on the Endangered Species List.
Krenz: “Those research projects documents that there’s actually more Kittlitz’s Murrelets than people thought previously, now, and that the high numbers that were seen in the early 90’s may have been due to poor sampling designs and poor study designs so that those were probably not accurate numbers.”
The federal program has also been used in Alaska to reintroduce wood bison to the Lower Yukon and Innoko River areas.