(Image: Brown pelicans off Morro Bay, California. Credit: mikebaird/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
Founded in 1951, The Nature Conservancy is a conservation organization working globally to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. With a membership more than 1 million strong, The Nature Conservancy has worked to save habitats such as grasslands, rivers, and coral reefs while also addressing threats to conservation such as climate change, fire, and invasive species.
The Nature Conservancy utilizes a science-based approach that determines where to work, what to conserve and what strategies will be best to meet their goals. With plant and animal species disappearing at alarming rates, the Conservancy is working to conserve “enough of everything,” such as habitat types, not just endangered species. Employing over 700 staff scientists, the Nature Conservancy’s action goes far beyond the lobbying for conservation they do with other groups—the Conservancy develops innovative conservation approaches and gets citizens invested in their own area’s biodiversity through community restoration.
“…we believe the needs of people and nature can coexist, and through sound science, diverse partnerships and careful compromise, balance can be restored,” explains President and CEO Mark Tercek. “With a global, ecosystem-based approach to conservation honed over nearly 60 years, The Nature Conservancy understands that to have maximum impact at one spot on the globe, you must understand its place in the whole. And that ability to be big and small at the same time is, I contend, The Nature Conservancy’s great strength.”
Water and Forest Producers Program
This initiative was designed to help protect the freshwater supply for Rio de Janeiro. Launched in Rio Claro, located on the Guandu River watershed, this program compensates rural landowners for the forest restoration work they do, which in turn protects the freshwater resources. The watershed provides about 80% of the fresh water and generates about 25% of the electicity used by residents of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. By planting trees, which hold water and help minimize erosion, sediment and nutrients stay on land and out of the rivers. Landowners who plant are rewarded for doing so with payments from the water-dependent utilities and industries in the area.
Since May, 18 rural landowners have enrolled in the program and are receiving payment for their forestation efforts.
Seagrass Restoration
In the early 1930s, a noxious slime mold and the powerful Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane combined to devastate seagrass meadows in Virginia’s coastal bays. While sea grasses did regenerate in the Chesapeake Bay, they never returned to Virginia’s other coastal bays. Over the last ten years, the Nature Conservancy has aimed to regenerate the seagrass.
- More than 100 volunteers spread the grass seeds shoots throughout the bays.
- 23 million seeds and shoots have been planted across 200 acres.
- The South, Spider Crab, Hog Island and Cobb Island Bays now support this seagrass.
