Military lands are required to comply with the pro-
visions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and other
environmental laws. The management of threatened
and endangered species and their habitats on military
lands has become a focal point of natural resources
management at such installations as Fort Bragg, NC;
Fort Benning, GA and Fort Polk, LA (for the endan-
gered red-cockaded woodpecker), Fort Irwin, CA (for
the desert tortoise) and in Hawaii for several endan-
gered plants (Shaw et al. 2005).
The DOD formally established a policy for an eco-
system approach to natural resources management
and for the conservation of biological diversity in its
1996 Conservation Instruction 4715.3 (Benton et al.
2008). The stated goal of ecosystem management is to
ensure that military lands support present and future
training and testing requirements while preserving,
improving, and enhancing ecosystem integrity. Over
the long-term, this approach is intended to maintain
and improve the sustainability and biological diver-
sity of terrestrial and aquatic (including marine) eco-
systems while supporting sustainable economies, hu-
man use, and the environment required for realistic
military training operations. This directive establishes
the following goals for the conservation of biological
diversity on military lands (Benton et al. 2008):
- Maintain or restore remaining native ecosystem
types across their natural range of variation. - Maintain or reestablish viable populations of
all native species in an installation’s areas of
natural habitat, when practical. - Maintain evolutionary and ecological process-
es, such as disturbance regimes, hydrological
processes, and nutrient cycles. - Manage over sufficiently long-time periods for
changing system dynamics. - Accommodate human use in those guidelines.