Joshua Roberts / Reuters President Donald Trump and acting U.S. Secretary of Interior David Bernhardt at the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, D.C., in January.

In an early effort to earn points with conservation groups, acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is set to sign a pair of secretarial orders that he said will improve public access to federal lands and protect key habitat for moose and bighorn sheep.

Bernhardt, an avid hunter and former fossil fuel lobbyist, unveiled limited details about the upcoming directives during a speech Wednesday morning at the North American Wildlife & Natural Resources Conference in Denver. The move comes a month after President Donald Trump announced his intent to nominate Bernhardt to replace former agency chief Ryan Zinke, who resigned in early January under a cloud of ethics scandals.

One order expands a secretarial order Zinke signed in February 2018 directing agency officials to work with western states to “enhance and improve the quality of big-game winter range and migration corridor habitat” for elk, antelope and mule deer, with an ultimate goal being to expand opportunities for hunting. The new directive will apply to moose and bighorn sheep, as well as summer range habitat for those species, Bernhardt said.

Zinke’s initiative on migration corridors was widely celebrated, only to have the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management turn around and offer oil and gas leases in the very habitat the initiative was meant to protect. A recent analysis by the Center for American Progress found that during the Trump administration’s first two years, nearly one-fifth of the oil and gas leases offered by BLM in the Intermountain West region were in areas identified as important migration or wintering grounds for elk, mule deer and antelope. In New Mexico, 82 percent of leases were in these habitats.

In an emailed statement, Jesse Prentice-Dunn, policy director at the Colorado-based Center for Western Priorities, said Bernhardt “can’t use his signature to cover up the damage he has already caused to our public lands in less than two years at Interior.”

“Even as he put his pen to paper today, Bernhardt continues to lease off hundreds of thousands of acres of prime wildlife habitat for oil and gas drilling,” he added.

Bernhardt’s second order would change how the agency goes about determining if parcels of federal land are suitable for sale or transfer to state control. The Federal Lands Policy and Management Act of 1976 allows for tracts of public land to be considered for sale if they meet certain criteria, including being “difficult and uneconomic to manage,” if the land is “no longer required” for the specific purpose for which it was acquired, and if its sale would “serve important public objectives,” including the “expansion of communities and economic development.”

Moving forward, BLM will be required to “think very carefully” about how any potential sale, transfer or exchange of federal land would impact hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation, Bernhardt said.

This new test is “focused on enhancing access,” Bernhardt said.