ASHEVILLE – They’ve had their boots in the mud, the creeks, the cliffs, coves and mountainsides of Western North Carolina for the last few decades, seeking open chunks of land for permanent conservation.
Success for land-trust supporters in preserving lands important for scenic value, clean water, wildlife habitat and public recreation has come in securing land in the sight-line of the Blue Ridge Parkway, stitching together private lands to create state parks such as Chimney Rock and Mount Mitchell. Success also has come by purchasing conservation easements on small, hidden parcels in the highlands that are home to rare salamanders and songbirds.
But have the land trusts always been looking in the right places?
That’s what a recent scientific study by The Nature Conservancy sought to find out. And now, a new multimillion-dollar grant from the New York-based Open Space Institute hopes to steer efforts in the right direction.
The Nature Conservancy report, “Resilient Sites for Terrestrial Conservation in the Southeast,” identified the most resilient sites in the region, considered to be “natural strongholds” likely to withstand the growing impact of climate change and to offer refuge to a diverse array of animals.
The areas of focus include locations identified as priority landscapes for protection. They also are among some of the nation’s most biologically diverse places and face a growing set of threats from development, inappropriate timber harvesting and invasive species. Over the next 20 years, the Southeast is expected to lose almost 20 million acres of forests due principally to development and conversion.
Using the new scientific data, the Open Space Institute, a leading regional land conservation organization, is seeking to focus attention on those most biologically rich and threatened places.
To that end, the institute announced earlier this week the OSI Initiative, in which $5.5 million in matching grants for land protection will be available to land trusts that focus on “climate-resilient” lands — those that will help facilitate wildlife adaptation to climate change within two new sites:
•The Southern Blue Ridge, encompassing mountainous parts of WNC, Upstate South Carolina, and Tennessee.
•The Greater Pee Dee River, which straddles the North and South Carolina border along key river corridors and stretches from the coast to the Sandhills and Uwharrie Mountains.
The initiative, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, is part of a vanguard effort to use cutting-edge climate science to identify and protect resilient lands across the eastern United States. The new awards expand on the OSI’s $12 million Resilient Landscapes Initiative that began in the Northeast two years ago.
This program, land conservation leaders say, will be meaningful for preserving natural lands for future tourism, wildlife, hunting and angling.
“We feel this is a really groundbreaking way for trying to preserve biodiversity,” said the Open Space Institute’s David Ray, who is based in Asheville. “The goal is to help get it out there and get it out in front of land trusts and see if this is useful and what ways can we develop it.”
Jess Laggis, coalition director of Blue Ridge Forever, a coalition of WNC land trusts, said the group is excited about the Open Space Institute’s new model for identifying lands for conservation, as well as the amount of money up for grabs.
“The Blue Ridge Forever land trust partners are thrilled that the Open Space Institute has included the Southern Blue Ridge as one of the focus areas in the new Southeast Resilient Landscapes Fund, opening the possibility of funding to help protect more land in our region,” Laggis said.
Blue Ridge Forever and its 10 member land trusts, which include the Asheville-based Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy in the Henderson-Transylvania county area, Foothills Conservancy, the Blue Ridge Conservancy in Boone, among others, has conserved nearly 80,000 acres in its 10-year existence.
The group had a goal of conserving 50,000 acres in the Southern Blue Ridge by 2010, which it reached, Laggis said, and has set a new goal of conserving 30,000 more acres by the end of 2015. She said it is 80 percent there. The Open Space Institute’s initiative should help complete the goal.
“The Southern Blue Ridge is among the most ecologically diverse and fragile regions in the country. The intact forests and mountains here are an outstanding resource for resilience to climate change. However, these mountains are a magnet for population growth and development, which potentially threatens the future viability of wildlife habitat, clean water sources and other ecological systems,” Laggis said.
“The need for conservation in these mountains remains acute. The Blue Ridge Forever partners will seize the opportunity to leverage this (OSI) investment as a catalyst for further land protection in the Southern Blue Ridge focus area,” Laggis said.
Seeking conservation eyes with a new lens –
The Open Space Institute is using data from The Nature Conservancy report to identify which areas have the best chance for plant and animal survival in the future with climate change. That is a different approach from the way land trusts have worked, said Ray, who formerly worked for the Nature Conservancy.
It will be looking at lands that have the potential for future resistance to climate change, rather than lands that are valuable to plant and wildlife species today.
“The big criteria around which it’s centered is climate-change resistance and science,” Ray said. “Working with the Doris Duke Foundation, we want to expose the land trust world to this idea to see if it’s useful.”
Requests for proposals are open for land trusts seeking funds to purchase land or conservation easements, with the $5.5 million available in matching grants in the new focus areas.
The Southern Blue Ridge focus area includes lands up and down the Blue Ridge Escarpment, as far north as Ashe County, Roan Mountain, Grandfather Mountain, down to the Black Mountains, which include Mount Mitchell (the highest peak in the Eastern United States), and down through Hickory Nut Gorge east of Asheville, and as far south as the Upstate of South Carolina, from the Landrum area west to Walhalla and the Georgia border.
Any land trust accredited by a land trust alliance or on a path toward getting accredited needs to have a project that would be within the focus area. The deadline to apply is July 21 and awards will be announced in September, Ray said.
One of the criteria for the OSI grants is matching funds for the project, available from a foundation grant or clean water management trust fund, private funds, or landowner donation, he said.
“First and foremost, our goal is to find projects that are good examples of use of this resilience data that protecting land is a valuable tool in helping plants and animals deal with challenges that will come with climate change,” he said.
“Climate change obviously is a huge issue for everybody: for people trying to plan for emergencies; insurance companies taking note of it because of what it might do to business models; and conservation; flooding, how it will impact our human communities; and what is it going to do to our wildlife?” Ray said.
The climate-resistance grant proposals must identify “natural strongholds” on the landscape — physical attributes or landforms that create a natural stronghold that will withstand climate change and offer options for plant and wildlife species that are there, such as mountains, cliffs and river valleys, so wildlife won’t have to move 100 miles or more when their current habitats are altered by climate change.
Rebekah Robinson, assistant director of the Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy, based in Hendersonville, called the OSI climate-resilience grant “fantastic,” and was pleased to see the Southern Blue Ridge chosen as one of the areas.
“A lot of the local land trusts have been using GIS data to help prioritize projects for a long time, but this is a lot larger landscape view. That’s unique,” Robinson said.
“The scale of it is important. With climate change, they’re looking not at where species are found now, but where they might need to go,” she said. “They will require much larger landscape level for movement over time. It’s definitely one of the bigger pledges of funding for our region.”
The Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy has been instrumental in past decades in securing land for conservation in the Hickory Nut Gorge, including Bearwallow Mountain, DuPont State Forest, and the newest state forest, known as Headwaters. So far, the group has secured 4,000 acres of forested land in the East Fork Headwaters of Transylvania County, permanently conserving waterfalls, clean drinking water and wildlife habitat.
Some 4,000 more acres are needed to be purchased to complete the state forest.
Robinson said it is too early to commit to an OSI proposal project, but said Headwaters is a priority for the land trust.
“We’ve identified a few ideas but hope to have some specific tracts in the next month or so,” she said. “When we protect land, it protects natural heritage, but that is part of our heritage and quality of life, especially here in WNC.”
Jay Leutze, a board trustee with the Southern Appalachians Highlands Conservancy, had a similar reaction to news of the climate-resiliency grants: excitement but hesistancy to name any projects just yet.
The conservancy was founded in 1974 in Asheville, is one of the region’s oldest land trusts, and has worked to protect more than 64,000 acres throughout the region, including such iconic places as the Highlands of Roan on the North Carolina/Tennessee border to the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and smaller parcels with big impact such as agricultural lands in the Sandy Mush area of Buncombe County and in the Hickory Nut Gorge.
The new model for how to identify lands is interesting and exciting, its leaders say.
Land trusts are always looking for the right way to achieve permanent land purchases. The resiliency analysis is helpful when looking at where to deploy scarce dollars for land conservation, Leutze said.
“We know with a changing climate, plants and animals migrate to find optimal condition. This is wise money being spent by OSI and their partners. This is really forward-looking to predict which plants and animals will have the best chance to survive climate change,” he said.
“We are excited to analyze our own landscape and our own area looking at these new tools,” he said. “They already tell us we tend to be looking in places that are resilient, but also looking at niche places especially that will keep high-elevation places protected. We have to be sure we have enough size protected to cover all our bases.”
Land trusts know, for instance, that bears need a big landscape to breed successfully, and neo-tropical songbirds need to find welcoming habitat in South America in the winter and in the Southern Appalachians in the spring.
“Now we’re interested in looking at large landscapes in a new way that are dynamic and take into account future conditions,” he said.
Beyond habitat, protection of the lands as climate strongholds also helps defend natural places that contribute economically to the Southeast. A recent National Park Service report found that visitors to national parks in North Carolina supported 18,528 jobs and had a cumulative benefit to the state economy of $1.5 billion. In 2011, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife survey found North Carolina residents and nonresidents spent $3.3 billion on wildlife recreation in the state.
“Hunters and anglers know firsthand that wildlife is being affected by a warming climate,” said Tim Gestwicki, chief executive officer of the N.C. Wildlife Federation. “We applaud this initiative for raising awareness about the effects of climate change on wildlife in the Southeast, and for helping to protect the places that will enable wildlife to thrive into the future.”
The Resilient Landscapes Initiative coincides with a recent report released by the National Academy of Sciences naming the Blue Ridge Mountains as the No. 1 most important area in the country for conservation expansion.
Susie Hamrick Jones is executive director of the Foothills Conservancy, a land trust based in Morganton, which works in the gorges east of the Blue Ridge Escarpment that drain into the Atlantic watershed, such as Hickory Nut Gorge and further east in the South Mountains area and the privately owned Box Creek Wilderness.
“Those gorges are so important. They contain nooks and crannies and changes in elevation and changes in soil type. They provide a great environment for plants and animals to change and adapt as the earth warms. They can move up quickly in elevation if they need to,” she said.
But what makes the OSI Climate Resilient Landscapes initiative so exciting, Hamrick Jones said candidly, is the money.
“What’s missing, what’s so exciting about (OSI initiative) is sufficient sources of funding,” she said.
“Having additional sources of funding both public and private is very welcome and comes at an opportune time,” she said. “We have one of the most important regions of the country and in the world. The Southern Blue Ridge that needs to be protected.”
To learn more about the Resilient Landscapes Initiative, visit www.osiny.org/reslientlandscapes.
