Missoula News

STATE OF THE ROCKIES

Montana Counties Do Well for Habitat, Worse for Toxicity

By Dana Green, 4-13-06

Animals have relatively large places to roam in most Montana counties, according to a recent report card on the Rockies.

Most of Montana’s counties rank among those with the least threat to habitat and the least amount of land fragmentation in the 2006 Colorado College State of the Rockies Report. The annual report card, featuring research by Colorado College students, was released this past week.

However, two rural counties – Jefferson and Broadwater – rank among those with greatest habitat threat of 81 rural counties in the Rocky Mountains.

The eight-state Rockies Region included Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The report also graded other environmental factors, including climate change impacts, toxicity levels in the region’s big cities, changes to ranching, and conservation lands.

Student researchers ranked both current and future threats to habitat, based on urbanization, agriculture uses, and water diversion, as well as projected growth figures and land protected as public lands or in private easements.

There was positive news for Missoula in the report: Missoula County is among the least habitat-threatened metropolitan counties in the entire region, ranking 58th out of 61 on the overall threat index.

Missoula had lower percentages of ag land and significantly developed land (urban areas and roads), and gained high marks for protected lands. For projected population growth, it came out at 14 percent, while the median projected growth was 18 percent across bigger cities.

“The population is not expected to grow as much in Missoula, so that helped out its rankings,” said State of the Rockies Project Coordinator Bryan Hurlbutt.

For pollution measurements, however, Missoula didn’t fare very well. In rankings on pounds of toxic pollution released to air, water and land, based on facilities that report annual figures to the EPA, Missoula ranked worse than the median.

“Those were the only areas Missoula ranked poorly,” Hurlbutt said.

Two rural Montana counties also got poor grades on the report card – ranking low for current and future habitat: Jefferson and Broadwater counties came in at fourth and eighth of the 81 rural counties researched, for threatened habitat.

According to the report, Jefferson had staggering toxic air and land emissions for 2003 (the last year studied for the report), high daily water withdrawals, and high projected population growth for a rural county.

For Broadwater, farm and ranch land was a large percentage of the total county, along with weighty water withdrawals and population growth.

The entire 2006 Colorado College State of the Rockies report will be available online next week. It can also be ordered at or by calling (719) 389-6391.

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