Department of Defense Awards Protect Important Lands in Georgia, Maine and Nevada
U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, Greenville, SCFor IMMEDIATE RELEASE (August 11, 2015)
For the elite fighters of the Army’s 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, based at Ft. Stewart, Georgia, ensuring the gopher tortoise does not become listed under the Endangered Species Act may be as important as any training mission. The 1st Battalion and the tortoise share a need for the state’s longleafpine forests. For the troops, the forests are essential for training. For the tortoises, it’s the only habitatwhere they can live. A new award from the Department of Defense’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) Program will protect some of the best tortoise habitat in Georgia. The project aims to help preclude an Endangered Species Act listing that could impact military training across the region.
“The REPI Challenge merges two essential interests,” said Peter Stangel, Senior Vice President at the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities (Endowment). “First is the need to protect critical training areas for our nation’s warfighters. Second is the desire to conserve natural resources, such as working forest lands that fuel our economy and quality of life. The Department of Defense, and particularly the REPI program, galvanizes partners from the public and private sectors to do this better than just aboutanybody.” The Endowment helped administer the 2015 REPI Challenge Program as a service to the Department of Defense.
The REPI Challenge, part of the REPI program, seeks to incentivize new practices that preserve compatible land uses and conserve natural landscapes in support of military readiness. It puts a premium on harnessing the creativity of the private sector to access and leverage unconventional sources of funding, attract philanthropic support, and take advantage of market-based approaches to land and resource conservation. Since 2003, the REPI program has protected 362,000 acres of buffer land at 80 locations in 28 states.
The three 2015 REPI Challenge awards will help protect compatible land uses around military installations and conserve at-risk species and natural resources in support of military readiness. The awards total more than $6 million and will leverage an additional $21 million from partners to help protect 28,050 acres.
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources led a team that received $2 million through the REPI Challenge, and an additional $2 million from the Army, to protect 7,016 acres of prime gopher tortoise habitat and longleaf pine ecosystems that benefit a host of species. Protecting this habitat and thesespecies on “off-installation” lands helps support conservation efforts at a regional scale and increases mission flexibility for both Fort Stewart and Fort Benning. A second award of $2 million will restrict development on 9,728 acres of timberlands that maintain a realistic, remote environment for the Naval Shipyard Portsmouth, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) School in Redington Township, Maine. The Trust for Public Land led a partnership that will help ensure necessary training conditions for the Navy while also protecting wildlife habitat and working forests that support local jobs.
The final award of just over $2 million will protect 11,306 acres from incompatible development to keep critical range training areas unrestricted along the Fallon Range Training Complex military influence area at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada. This project, led by the Nevada Department of Wildlife, is part of a larger effort to reduce sagebrush habitat loss and fragmentation and offers opportunities for conserving the Greater Sage Grouse and ensuring long-term compatible land uses that protect an irreplaceable training asset for the Department of Defense.
“The list of partners in 2015 REPI Challenge Program is impressive,” Stangel said. “These awards includematching funds and support from federal and state agencies, private conservation groups, and the philanthropic community, such as the Knobloch Family Foundation. Together they are demonstrating the power of collaboration to resolve natural resource conservation challenges.”
The REPI program is an excellent example of collaborative partnerships that work to protect forests and other lands that serve nearby communities. The program’s ideals align with those of the Endowment and showcase the ecological, social, and economic benefit of the collaborative, cost-sharing partnership investment model.
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For more information contact:
Peter Stangel, 404-915-2763; peter@usendowment.org
The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities (the Endowment) is a not-for-profit public charity working collaboratively with partners in the public and private sectors to advance systemic,transformative, and sustainable change for the health and vitality of the nation’s working forests and forest-reliant communities – www.usendowment.org
For more information about REPI and the REPI Challenge, please visit www.REPI.mil.
