Describing 2020 as a difficult year is quite an understatement. It took a heavy toll on all of us. Some have been harmed far more than others by COVID-19, racial injustice and harmful government policies. Under this shadow, writing a 2020 recap feels complicated, but also important because our collective work to fight against our planet’s ongoing human-caused extinction crisis remains critical for humans and wildlife alike. Here are some of the Rockies and Plains program’s most notable wildlife successes — and a couple losses — in 2020.

Coexisting With Wildlife

Defenders’ Rockies and Plains program focuses on restoring and protecting the most imperiled wildlife of North America’s Rocky Mountains and Great Plains regions, and this includes helping people coexist with them. Due to COVID-19, our seven staff members have worked from home in Colorado, Montana and Wyoming since March, with some exceptions over the summer for field work under strict social distancing requirements. Adapting to this new reality, we still managed to help complete 98 human-wildlife coexistence projects across the region in 2020! Each project directly saves wildlife by keeping them out of conflict with humans and increases human acceptance for sharing the landscape with wildlife. Our projects focused on coexisting with grizzly bears, wolves, beaver and Yellowstone bison, but they also helped protect many other species. …

2020: A Year Like No Other

The past year has challenged all of us in ways we could never have anticipated. Despite months of warranted civil unrest, the transition to fully remote work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and navigating through a turbulent election season, Defenders’ Washington D.C.-based headquarters, six field offices and satellite representatives across the nation managed to continue giving a voice to wildlife by advocating for imperiled species and habitat conservation.

The California program was no exception. While adapting to myriad unexpected challenges, our incredible team of conservation advocates worked statewide to stand up for wildlife and wild places.

Introducing the California Team

At the helm of the California team is Pamela Flick, who assumed the role of California program director this year and continues her work to advance species and habitat conservation statewide. In the Mojave Desert, Tom Egan weighs in on renewable energy and endangered species issues as California desert representative, with a special focus on the Agassiz’s tortoise and desert pronghorn. Jeff Aardahl, our California representative, works on protecting habitat for threatened and endangered species in the Mojave and Colorado deserts while advocating for responsible renewable energy projects. Rachel Zwillinger, our water policy advisor, provides expertise on implementation of environmental laws that affect Central Valley wetlands and the San Francisco Bay-Delta. Andy Johnson, who joined Defenders this year as a California representative, is our sea otter expert who focuses on marine and coastal issues. I also joined the team this year as California program coordinator and focus on legislative tracking, program administration and outreach! …

2020 has been a year of trials and tribulations, but among those were triumphs as well, and Defenders of Wildlife’s Landscape Conservation department was well equipped to handle the adversity and opportunities of the past year. …

2020 has been filled with many trials for Alaska’s program. We worked hard all year to fight the multitude of environmental rollbacks the Trump administration has aimed at wildlife and public lands in Alaska. However, from the very northern reaches of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to the very southern tips of the towering yellow cedars of the Tongass National Forest, we continued to push forward to fight for these incredible places, and we came out on top, succeeding in protecting wildlife and wild places.

Arctic Ocean: In November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld our challenge to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval of a proposed oil and gas development project in the Arctic Ocean. Defenders raised concerns about the project’s impacts on polar bears and questioned the agency’s perplexing conclusion that to build the project would result in fewer carbon emissions than to not build it. The court agreed that the agency had not ensured that harm to polar bears would be minimized or avoided and rejected the confusing emissions analysis. Existing and proposed oil and gas development along much of Alaska’s Arctic coastline is jeopardizing polar bear recovery, and this decision sends a strong message that industrializing their critical habitat is inconsistent with protecting and recovering these animals. …

As we enter the new year, the Northwest program is looking ahead with hope and excitement. We are grateful to our friends, partners and members and supporters who have stood by us and pushed us forward in defense of wildlife and wild places.

Across the Pacific Northwest, our team focuses on recovering struggling species, developing and promoting best practices for coexistence, maintaining protections of mature and old growth forests and implementing actions and policies to improve habitat quality for wildlife and humans alike. …

Defenders of Wildlife’s Field Conservation Program in the Southwest met the challenges of 2020 and achieved considerable success despite formidable hurdles. Our progress conserves wildlife from Arizona to the Gulf of Mexico including Mexican gray wolves, jaguar, yellow-billed cuckoo, beaver, meadow jumping mouse, golden-cheeked warbler and ocelot. Though unable to engage in the typical amount of face-to-face conservation work this year, we took advantage of strong partnerships with state and federal government as well as our NGO partners. We carried on with our advocacy, science and litigation to protect and restore imperiled wildlife in the Southwest.

As this most unusual year concludes, Defenders of Wildlife’s regional field offices have spent some time reflecting upon the year’s accomplishments. The Southeast team certainly has a lot to be proud of and is excited to continue our conservation work in 2021. This year brought many challenges to everyone around the globe, including wildlife…but still, the Southeast team was hard at work defending our nation’s precious natural resources in the name of wildlife conservation.

From June to July, the U.S. Forest Service sought detailed feedback and comments from valuable stakeholders upon the department’s release of the new draft Nantahala and Pisgah National Forest Plan. Southeast Program Director Ben Prater served as Defenders of Wildlife’s representative in a multitude of partnership and stakeholder meetings, advocating strongly for increased protections for wilderness areas and the maintenance of biodiversity in western North Carolina’s expansive national forests. Because of Ben’s outstanding work and collaborative efforts, Defenders of Wildlife was able to contribute substantively during the Forest Service’s public comment period alongside other key stakeholders. …

You’ve probably heard it a million times, but I’ll say it again anyway: We’re in the information age, where data and technology are king. They are the keys to most of the countless innovations we’ve seen in society over the past couple of decades. As part of the Center for Conservation Innovation team at Defenders working at the intersection of science, technology and policy to improve conservation, the information age makes us question: Are conservationists using data and technology to their full potential?

The answer is…complicated. A lot of data out there — often even more than researchers and practitioners can even process. Conservationists collect and generate a ton of that data but making that data widely available so that it can be easily used remains a challenge. …