PROVIDENCE — State environmental officials this year have been quietly revising Rhode Island’s long-term strategy for wildlife conservation, a key requirement for federal funding.

It’s called the State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP), and any state that wants State or Tribal Wildlife Grants, a funding program for wildlife conservation created in 2000, has to revise its strategy at least once every 10 years. The Department of Environmental Management last updated Rhode Island’s plan in 2015.

Over the past eight months, wildlife biologists inside DEM, The Nature Conservancy, the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, the University of Rhode Island, and other organizations are updating what Amanda Freitas, the state’s wildlife action plan ecologist, calls “the guide star” for DEM’s conservation efforts.

“We have phenomenal biologists, but one is charged with reptiles and amphibians, one is charged with waterfowl, and over in the Division of Marine Fisheries it’s the same thing, they have their own specialty they need to focus on,” Freitas told ecoRI News. “The wildlife action plan is when it all comes together and we look at what we need to be doing and how we can prioritize these species and habitats.”

From the ocean to the forest, Rhode Island is home to nearly 900 vertebrate species and another estimated 20,000 invertebrate species.

Freitas isn’t technically a DEM employee. She has a dual role, funded by federal funds and a state match, working for the department’s Division of Fish and Wildlife and the Rhode Island Natural History Survey. She was hired in 2013 to work on the 2015 version of the plan before moving to a more permanent role.

This year’s update will be the third iteration of the wildlife action plan. The original plan dates to 2005 — the original law passed by Congress didn’t include funding for the program, giving state environmental departments no incentive to write plans from scratch — and it was last updated in 2015. A big part of the work this year is going over the old plan and seeing what has changed for habitats and the species that inhabit them.

Freitas noted the plan contains actions residents can take to help conserve species that could have big impacts in the natural world.

“A great conservation action is avoiding pesticides or fertilizers, or being really sparing with them,” she said. “Take a portion of land you’re not using and plant native species. That has huge impacts up and down the food chain; it’s basically a statewide conservation action to do that, and it helps so many different species across the entire wildlife action plan.

“Those are the things I try to push, because they have so much impact. They really address the death by 1,000 cuts facing some species in a state like Rhode Island where we have so much development up against our natural areas.”

Since 2001 and through the most recent federal fiscal year, Rhode Island has received $13.9 million in wildlife grants stemming from the federal action plan, averaging about half a million every year. Nationwide, the program has paid out over $1 billion in grants.

In 2023, for example, DEM received $590,205 in federal funding, but the state had to pony up a 35% match to unlock the funding.

Over half of the species of greatest conservation need listed in the action plan get funding from the State and Tribal Wildlife Grants Program, money the state is unlikely to allocate on its own. Prior work funded in part or wholly with these grants include projects to monitor least terns, a threatened regional bird species in the Northeast, and projects directed at addressing knowledge gaps concerning Jonah crabs.

“You can’t do conservation without funding,” Freitas said. “The biggest pots of money that fund the Division of Fish and Wildlife and the Division of Marine Fisheries’ work are restricted to use for a few taxa. The wildlife action grants is a smaller pot of money, but with relatively few exceptions, it’s the only pot of money that allows work on reptiles, amphibians and other vertebrates.”

Freitas said DEM is planning to host community workshops in the fall to solicit comments from residents on the draft wildlife action plan, and to educate residents on what species need conservation and what they can do to help. The department also has an awareness survey online, designed to guide the state on the best way to get information and content out of the final plan.

The final due date for the new wildlife action plan is April 2026.