About

Summary of New Jersey’s State Wildlife Action Plan

The 2025 State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) is the second comprehensive review since 2005 and, for the first time, includes plants in the list of Species of Greatest Conservation Need. As required by USFWS, New Jersey will undertake a comprehensive review again in 2035.

In essence, this plan updates the 2017 SWAP’s assessment of the health of the state’s at-risk species and habitats, the problems they face, actions that are needed to conserve them over the long term, and a much-needed improvement in user accessibility. The plan fosters cooperation between partners in both the public and private sectors and enables effective conservation projects and provides a dynamic tool for all landowners and land managers. It is designed to serve as a framework for focusing actions to address the threats facing our at-risk species and the habitats required for their continued survival.

There are several key considerations that drive this revised plan.

• Habitat loss is the greatest threat to New Jersey’s wildlife
• Stewardship and restoration are critical actions
• Control of overabundant native species is necessary to protect habitat
• Invasive species threaten native biodiversity
• Sound science is a foundation for the plan
• Urban & suburban environments pose distinct challenges

Past Successes Have Laid a Strong Foundation for Future Conservation

New Jersey’s State Wildlife Action Plans have been a guide for conservation strategies to benefit wildlife and their habitats since 2006. Important actions from the plan have been implemented by local, county, state, and federal agencies, non-profit organizations, and private landowners. Key examples include:

• Bringing Bald Eagles back from the brink: From 2005 to 2014, the number of Bald Eagles nesting in New Jersey increased from 42 pairs to 150 pairs, a 257% increase.
• Restoring endangered Bog Turtle sites: Cooperative agreements with landowners have helped restore and protect valuable wetlands habitats.
• Restoring fish habitats: The Musconetcong and Raritan Rivers benefited from dam removals, and additional removals are planned for the Millstone and Paulins Kill Rivers.
• Managing complex wildlife habitats: Some agricultural grassland, early successional, wetland, and riparian habitats have been improved; degraded lake and stream shorelines were re-contoured and planted to enhance water quality and wildlife value; and young forest habitat was created and managed on private and public lands to increase species diversity and understory vegetation.

Species of Greatest Conservation Need

Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) are the heart of all State Wildlife Action Plans. Species of Greatest Conservation Need are defined as having small or declining populations, are at-risk, and/or are of management concern. The 2025 revised SGCN list includes both plants and animals. There are 614 animal SGCN and 128 plant SGCN. New Jersey’s list of SGCN includes amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, marine and freshwater fish, invertebrates (including pollinators), plants, and fungi.

For a complete list of NJ’s SGCN, click HERE .

Focus on Habitats

In broad terms, habitat is defined as a space that provides living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) resources needed by a species to survive, and most threats affecting at-risk species are directly linked to the habitats in which they live. For the 2025 SWAP revision, NJFW and our Technical Advisory Group changed the focus from “focal species” to addressing the threats that affect habitats. There are still species-specific actions that are important. However, by focusing our collective resources (time, talent, and money) on targeted conservation actions that address threats to habitats, we have a greater chance of improving the outcomes of the species living in those habitats.

The State Wildlife Action Plan uses a relatively coarse habitat classification to determine nineteen key habitat types.

Based in part on feedback from users of our 2017 SWAP, we divided New Jersey into nine regions: Kittatinny Ridge, Kittatinny Valley, Highlands, Piedmont, Inner Coastal Plain, Pinelands, Atlantic Coast, Delaware Bay, and Marine (which is entirely aquatic). The first eight regions are each characterized by landforms, soils, vegetation, and hydrological regimes that collectively support distinctive habitats and plant and animal communities.

Not all habitats are of equal condition and not all threats to habitats or species share the same scale. New Jersey is a densely settled state, with areas ranging from highly urbanized to large forests. The 2025 SWAP uses three mapping tools to assist users to make implementation, location, and scale decisions.

1. Habitat condition: The Ecological Priority Model map represents lands that are the most ecologically important in New Jersey and includes detailed, publicly available data across four broad ecological categories: water, rare species and natural communities, climate change resilience, and habitat connectivity. The Ecological Priority Map illustrates lands that are critical to protect to maintain the ecosystems of New Jersey. https://www.nj-map.com/blueprint/ecological/
2. Habitats where species occur: New Jersey’s Landscape Project map continues to be the principal tool that NJ Fish & Wildlife uses to document habitats that support endangered, threatened, and special concern wildlife.
3. Connectivity: Connecting Habitat Across New Jersey (CHANJ) is a multi-partner, multi-disciplinary strategic plan led by NJ Fish & Wildlife. CHANJ identifies key areas to preserve and restore habitat connectivity for terrestrial wildlife at the local, landscape region, and statewide levels.

Key Threats and Conservation Actions

New Jersey’s plants and wildlife and their associated habitats face hundreds of threats that impact their survival. The State Wildlife Action Plan is necessary because, without a plan to address the multitude of threats impacting our at-risk species, they could disappear from the state. Our 2025 SWAP focuses on identifying the key threats facing these habitats and the priority conservation actions necessary to alleviate their impacts. This plan identifies the threats facing our species at greatest risk of decline or extinction in the state and prioritizes the actions needed to address those threats. By focusing on those actions, we have a greater chance to recover or maintain populations.

Monitoring Effectiveness and Adapting Management for Greater Success

Monitoring comes in many forms and can serve different conservation purposes. At the basic level, monitoring identifies the presence or absence of a species at a given location. At a more detailed level, monitoring can help managers determine the effectiveness of conservation actions and, in turn, set the stage for adapting management actions to improve results.

The 2025 SWAP focuses on prioritizing both the threats facing NJ’s habitat and species and the most important conservation actions we, as a community, need to take to address those threats. All conservation actions were written using a results chain template that provides the opportunity to assess outcomes as they are implemented. During the prioritization process, certain priority conservation actions were further classified as “highest” priority. NJFW will work with staff and technical and conservation partners to refine and assess metrics including feasibility, potential effectiveness, and other criteria to complete their result chain metrics.

NJFW relies on its relationships with agencies, conservation organizations, and academia to help construct appropriate and achievable monitoring metrics and programs. Organizations have a variety of interests and roles in wildlife and habitat conservation, contributing to the challenge of identifying performance metrics and programs for the wide variety of projects and species. Results reported by conservation partners will help track implementation of the conservation actions and help determine the steps for adapting actions in response to those metrics.

Past and Current Monitoring Programs

Many of New Jersey’s SGCN and habitats have active monitoring programs, some dating back more than 60 years, and provide important trend data. Many also include data that helps evaluate the effectiveness of conservation projects and actions.

Notable monitoring programs in New Jersey include:

• The ENSP’s Landscape Project maps critical wildlife habitat using species occurrence data applied to dynamic data on suitable habitat types. Adopted by the NJDEP in 1993 to define habitat, it continues to be a powerful tool for conservation planning.
• Submerged Aquatic Vegetation Monitoring in Barnegat Bay is a long-term project that provides an indicator of water quality and the health of the food web for aquatic and waterfowl species.
• Since 2012, the Bird Response to Forest Management tracks the number of bird species using young and open-canopy forests on state lands by monitoring after treatment compared to before treatment during the breeding season. Using a bird conservation value, or a sum of species’ scores based on NJ SGCN criteria, forested sites managed to allow native shade-intolerant saplings, shrubs, and herbaceous vegetation to grow results in an average 290% increase in bird conservation value, an average 150% increase in the number of bird species, and a 250% increase in bird SGCN using the site.
• The New Jersey Bald Eagle Project has tracked the expansion of nesting Bald Eagles since 1982 when there was just one nest in the state. The survey is primarily conducted by volunteers, and results have been used to support the down-listing of Bald Eagle from endangered to special concern in 2025.
• The Saltmarsh Habitat and Avian Research Program was designed to detect population trends in a group of bird species that are difficult to monitor. It is already proving useful to design successful marsh restoration projects.
• Since 2001, the NJDEP Office of Natural Lands Management has conducted annual surveys for Seabeach Amaranth and associated rare beach and dune species on 120 miles of NJ’s coastline. Providing abundance trends over time, this survey identifies threats and informs adaptive management activities.
• The winter bat hibernacula survey, begun in 1995, has provided valuable data on bat populations after widespread mortality due to white-nose syndrome. It has helped identify differential recovery responses in cave bat species and hibernaculum conditions more conducive to recovery.
• Since 1992, the NJDEP has conducted benthic macroinvertebrate sampling at more than 760 Ambient Macroinvertebrate Network (AMNET) stations within the state’s 20 Watershed Management Areas. Results are used to evaluate aquatic life use, designate Category One waters, and inform New Jersey’s Long-Term Water Monitoring and Assessment Strategy and other publications.
• As of 2025, in the two years since NJ Wildlife Tracker was released as a more user-friendly way for the public to submit sightings of rare wildlife and wildlife-on-roads, more than 800 on-road sightings of almost 50 species have been documented.

Check out our summary list of Species and Guild-Level Monitoring Programs by the NJDEP and Conservation Partners .

Adaptive Management

Adaptive management is the process by which conservation actions are undertaken, assessed through careful monitoring, and then modified as necessary based on the results. Adaptive management is especially necessary in natural systems where there are many variables in the wildlife, habitats, limiting factors, and the complex interactions of these with the surrounding world.

In addition to supporting adaptive management in New Jersey, NJFW will continue to cooperate with work on at-risk species in other states by participating with the Northeast Fish and Wildlife Diversity Technical Committee and continuing to serve on the committee. Over the course of completing our anticipated C-SWG SWAP Enhancement Grant (2026-2028), NJFW will engage with key implementor groups, which will allow NJFW to review and analyze outcomes of actions taken and adjust as necessary.

Coordinating State & Regional Monitoring

While it is simple to create monitoring goals, it is much more challenging to implement them. Monitoring can be extremely time and resource intensive. It can also be difficult to connect conservation actions to observed population conditions because so many factors and influences are continually at play in nature. To help overcome these challenges, the Northeast Fish and Wildlife Diversity Technical Committee secured funding (the Regional Conservation Need fund from State Wildlife Grants) to create a Northeast region SWAP database to which NJ is committed to providing data. The database integrates SGCN data from the 13 states (plus the District of Columbia) and allows users across the country to access regional data. This met the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies’ proposed best management practices (2012) that state agencies establish monitoring programs that met their specific goals and integrated smoothly into monitoring programs regionally.

A key component of these recommendations was the use of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Tracking and Reporting on Actions for Conservation of Species (TRACS) system to allow information gathered on SGCN in Northeastern states to be integrated. This collaborative approach of using the same metrics to track progress toward goals will allow managers to better target their SGCN management actions to achieve the greatest conservation benefits in New Jersey and throughout species’ range. Both the integration of state data into a regional database and the system to share state monitoring efforts and outcomes are currently in development.

How New Jersey is Meeting Federal Requirements Now and in the Future

As with the 2017 Plan, the 2025 State Wildlife Action Plan must meet a set of federal requirements overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Specifically, every plan across the country must address eight key elements.

View the entire document by clicking HERE .