Wildlife Management Areas

Thirty-one Wildlife Management Areas located in seven Fish and Game regions have been established to protect wildlife habitat and are available for hunting, fishing and other public enjoyment of wildlife. Varying from 275 to 85,000 acres, each area is dedicated to primary purposes such as big game, waterfowl and upland game. The lands encompassed by the WMAs vary from backcountry forested habitats for big game animals to agricultural areas with important pheasant and waterfowl habitat. Thousands of big game animals winter on some WMAs and tens of thousands of waterfowl winter on others. Nongame wildlife use all the WMAs. These lands are diverse and critical habitats that provide great opportunities to enjoy both game and nongame wildlife. Various private, state, and federal entities have entered into agreements with or sold lands to IDFG for the management of the state's fish and wildlife. Each property agreement/lease/deed/easement/permit in the IDFG Lands database was digitized based on their legal descriptions. Various GIS datasets were used to help digitize each property: township range section, geographic names, ITD roads, FS roads, hydrography, land ownership, county boundaries, etc. Properties were combined (via dissolve) based on property name to create the polygons for each WMA.