Southeast Region

For nearly a decade, our Region has followed the following guiding principles we all hold as professional resource managers and ethical public servants.

• Communication: Our actions are based on open and honest dialogue.
• Science: Our work is grounded in credible, objective science.
• Stewardship:  Our commitment is to conserve natural resources for future generations.
• Service: It is our privilege to serve the American people.
• Professionalism: We hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards, strive for excellence, and respect others.
• Partnerships: We emphasize partnerships using creative and innovative approaches, where needed.
• People: We recognize our employees, volunteers, and partners as critical to our conservation success.
• Legacy: Our goal is to ensure the future of natural resource conservation by connecting people with nature.

Our Vision

Together, we will connect lands and waters to sustain fish, wildlife and plants by being visionary leaders, bold innovators and trusted partners, working with and for people.

Regional Priorities

Building on more than a century of conservation, the Southeast Region continues to refine and adapt our complex and innovative portfolio of conservation tools to deal with the challenges of the 21st century. The following three broad priorities and components are intended to focus our efforts for furthering our mission and conservation goals. Programs will use these priorities to develop goals and activities.

The challenges of today have outgrown any single agency approach. It will take a combined effort of many public and private organizations to deal with the landscape‐scale issues facing us all. Moreover, we must be ever vigilant to engage our communities and inspire our public to be natural resource stewards whose support is essential to long-term success.

We will promote hunting, fishing, wildlife observation, and nature photography as a means to connect people with nature and provide for sustainable resource utilization. Similarly, we will encourage environmental education programs and interpretive resources to raise awareness of our mission, how we implement it, and how it benefits the public. We must continue to expand on existing, and seek out new outreach efforts and recreational opportunities in order to remain relevant to the American people and generate the appreciation and enthusiasm that is needed to fuel the next generation of conservationists.

The people who make up the Service's Southeast Region draw great strength and promise from a broad, partner-driven approach to conservation. From the Caribbean north to the Appalachians, west to the Ozarks, and then south to the bottomland hardwoods of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Coast, we have the charge to work with our partners to conserve some of the world's richest and most diverse fish and wildlife habitat.

Knitted together by some of the nation’s most beautiful rivers, we know our "all hands" approach to conservation is the only way to meet the challenges and opportunities the 21st century is presenting us with. Our goal is to ensure the future of natural resource conservation by connecting people with nature.