2025 State Wildlife Action Plan

New Hampshire Revision to the Wildlife Action Plan

Background

The revision of the New Hampshire State Wildlife Action Plan is currently underway. Every 10 years (since the first Wildlife Action Plan completed in 2005), the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, led by the Nongame and Endangered Wildlife Program, revises the state’s Wildlife Action Plan, an assessment of the health of New Hampshire’s wildlife and habitats, and a blueprint for conserving them. The New Hampshire Wildlife Action Plan is essential because it lays the framework for protecting wildlife and habitats that are facing threats, while also defining specific actions that can be taken to ensure common species remain common. 
This plan provides a strategic vision for conserving New Hampshire’s most vulnerable wildlife species and habitats, so that individual citizens, communities, university researchers, biologists, land trusts, businesses, and other organizations can participate in conservation efforts in the Granite state. The 2025 revision builds upon past successes of the last two Wildlife Action Plans and ensures that New Hampshire Fish and Game and its many partners have a conservation roadmap for the next 10 years that allow us to work towards our common goal of conserving New Hampshire’s wildlife and landscapes, so they can be enjoyed for many generations to come. 

Revision Process

Since the first New Hampshire Wildlife Action Plan that was completed in 2005, some species have been recovered while others now require new conservation actions; thousands of acres of wildlife habitat have been protected while others have begun to face new threats; and conservation partners across the state have implemented hundreds of actions identified in the NH Wildlife Action Plan, and are ready to continue their work. Wildlife Action Plans were created to be dynamic, adaptable frameworks for tackling the most relevant challenges affecting fish and wildlife populations. For this reason, every 10 years, New Hampshire undergoes the two year long process of revising their Wildlife Action Plan—New Hampshire Fish and Game collaborates with conservation partners across the state, including New Hampshire Audubon, Natural Heritage Bureau, non-profit environmental organizations, land trusts, and many more, to update the Species of Greatest Conservation Need list, assess current habitat conditions, analyze the threats facing these species and habitats, and compile the actions needed to protect them.
 

Species of Greatest Conservation Need

The first step in the Wildlife Action Plan revision process is selecting the Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN). SGCN are those New Hampshire species that are most at-risk—they are experiencing declining numbers, loss of habitat, and / or a variety of other threats, such as disease, development, and pollution. Without conservation actions, these species are likely to severely decline or disappear from New Hampshire. The latest NH SGCN list includes species such as Moose, Peregrine Falcon, Brook Trout, Monarch Butterfly, Canada Lynx, and Humpback Whale. By identifying and protecting SGCN and their habitats, all of New Hampshire’s wildlife species can thrive.

The SGCN list is a crucial component of a state Wildlife Action Plan—it provides state agencies, nonprofit organizations, researchers, and anyone who wishes to take part in conservation efforts with guidance on how to determine species at risk, the threats they face, and the actions needed to conserve them. The SGCN list should also be inclusive of the full diversity of species in New Hampshire.

Learn more and see the proposed 2025 SGCN List   

SGCN Selection Process

To the extent that information was available, all wildlife species native to New Hampshire were eligible for identification as 2025 SGCN. Non-game species, game species, fish, and marine animals were all evaluated regardless of taxonomic group . The following information sources were used to compile the SGCN list:

  1. All 169 SGCN from the 2015 NH Wildlife Action Plan were considered for inclusion on the 2025 SGCN list. 
  2. The Northeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ (NEAFWA) Fish and Wildlife Diversity Technical Committee compiles a list of Regional Species of Greatest Conservation Need (RSGCN) every five years, with the latest being released in 2023. In this most recent update, 382 species were listed as RSGCN, and 229 species were listed as Watchlist (Assessment Priority). All species that were included on these lists and are known to regularly occur in NH were considered for inclusion on the NH SGCN list.
  3. All New Hampshire species listed as endangered or threatened in New Hampshire, and those federally listed under the Endangered Species Act (1973) are included as NH SGCN.
  4. Taxonomic experts provided suggestions of species to be considered based on professional knowledge. This included proposals to add species that were not yet covered by categories 1-3, above.

Species were evaluated based on factors such as strong population declines, clearly identified emerging threats to the species or species’ habitat in New Hampshire, national assessment priority status, keystone or indicator species status, species vulnerability due to life-history traits, distribution and abundance in New Hampshire and the Northeast, and the availability of information on species’ status, trends, and threats in the state.

New to the 2025 SGCN list are plants. The SGCN plant selection process was similar to the above process, where national assessment priority status was considered, including Native Plant Trust’s Flora Conservanda New England categories 1-4, and North Atlantic LCC Priority list. In addition, species were included based on their presence in particular habitats and the likelihood of being vulnerable to identifiable, actionable threats.

Assessment Need Species:

In addition to SGCN, New Hampshire developed a list of species that are considered “Assessment Need.” This category was adapted from the Northeast Regional Conservation Synthesis for 2025 State Wildlife Action Plans’ “Watchlist” category. New Hampshire opted to use the term “Assessment Need” in order to more accurately capture the diversity of reasons a species would be on this list, as opposed to being categorized as SGCN. Assessment Need species are those species for which the necessary actions involve surveying and monitoring in order to determine conservation status, relevant threats, or potential future declines. By completing surveying and monitoring actions for these species, they have the potential to be moved to the SGCN category and be assigned specific conservation actions.

Examples of categories that Assessment Need species may fall into are:

  1. Watchlist: These are species that are presently secure in New Hampshire but of concern elsewhere in the Northeast. Many of these species are suspected to be threatened by emerging threats, such as climate change, that are affecting populations more strongly to our south. Conservation actions for Watchlist species generally consist of surveillance monitoring to detect changes in status that might call for heightened conservation concern.
  2. Status Assessment (or Monitoring Need): These are species for which there are not enough data to fully evaluate the conservation status of the species in New Hampshire. Examples of data deficiencies include information on distribution, abundance, and / or population trend. These species are priorities for new survey or monitoring actions.
  3. Threats Assessment (or Research Need): These are species for which available data suggest populations of are strongly declining, but biologists are unsure of potential threats causing these declines, and thus insufficiently informed to propose conservation actions. These species are priorities for research projects at the state or regional level.