Whew! What did we miss?

When the lapse in federal appropriations began on October 1st, I don’t think any of the SECAS staff team imagined it would last until mid-November. SECAS receives significant investment from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, largely through staff capacity. So while the partnership carried on, as furloughed federal employees, all the staff had to step away from our desks for the duration of the 44-day shutdown.

But now we’re back–and very pleased to return to our regularly scheduled SECAS programming. We want to catch everyone up on some updates and upcoming adjustments as we work to get things back on track!

• The release of version 2025 of the Southeast Conservation Blueprint was originally scheduled for mid-October ahead of the 79th Annual Conference of the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (SEAFWA). While the data, code and documentation are all complete, we still have a couple more weeks of work ahead of us to push the new Blueprint into online viewers like the Blueprint Explorer and SECAS Atlas, publish metadata, update the website, etc. So please bear with us as we strive to make Blueprint 2025 available by the first week of December! Hopefully it will be worth the wait.

• To align with the delayed release timeline, the Third Thursday Web Forum on Blueprint 2025 that was originally scheduled for Thursday 11/20 has been rescheduled for the second Thursday of December, 12/11, still at 10 am ET. If you already registered, you should have been notified via email of the schedule change. If you haven’t registered yet, but want to, you can sign up here. Rua will talk about what’s new in this year’s Blueprint update, including improved prioritization and connectivity methods, as well as a number of new and improved indicators for both the continent and Caribbean.

• The October Third Thursday Web Forum on river cane restoration that was scheduled during the shutdown on 10/16, Raising Cane and Reviving Relationships, will be rescheduled for a third Thursday in 2026. If you initially registered for that webinar, we will be in touch directly about the new date and time once we have it on the calendar. It will also be advertised through the usual channels.

• Speaking of the SEAWFWA annual conference, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to many partners who helped run the 11th annual SECAS symposium entitled Beyond the Boundaries: Partnering with States to Support and Implement Wildlife Action Plans at Regional Scales. Special shout-outs to Cari Furiness and Paul Armsworth with the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, Gordon Myers with the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Michael Fedoroff with the Rivercane Restoration Alliance, Shannon Deaton with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, and Kevin Lowrey with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR). These folks stepped in to facilitate, present, emcee, and keep things running smoothly since SECAS staff could not attend. Big thanks also to our Steering Committee member, Ted Will with Georgia DNR, who provided a warm welcome to our symposium. We’ll share more information about this symposium and its outcomes in a later blog, but there was excellent discussion about how SECAS can support implementation of Wildlife Action Plans. The fact that the show went on without us is such a testament to the power of partnership!

• Also at the SEAFWA conference, the SECAS Executive Steering Committee met to discuss future directions and next steps for the partnership. We’ll share more on what came out of that meeting in a future blog as well. This was the first Steering Committee meeting led by the new Chair, Nicole Angeli, who serves as Director of the Division of Fish and Wildlife for the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources. It also included our newest Steering Committee Member, Kyle Briggs, Executive Director of the NC Wildlife Resources Commission, who filled the vacancy left by the retirement of former Steering Committee Chair Robert Boyles, previous Director of the SC Department of Natural Resources.