May 2016

The Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) Council recently met in Austin, Texas on April 25-26, 2016. At the meeting, LCC Council members elected Kelley Myers, Conservation and Recreation Division Administrator with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, as its Council Co-Chair.  She will serve with fellow co-chair, P. Lynn Scarlett, Managing Director of Public Policy with The Nature Conservancy. 

The LCC Council also voted to welcome new members-at-large: Ryan Orndorff, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Energy, Installations and...

New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has announced plans to manage at least 10 percent of forested stands on 90 of the agency's 125 Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) as young forest. Over the next ten years, DEC will use timber harvests and other management techniques to create young forest on approximately 12,000 of the 120,000 wooded acres on WMAs statewide; those acres do not include areas of shrubland, which will be managed separately. DEC plans to maintain 10 percent of all WMA woodlands as young forest in perpetuity.

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Eleven members of the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies' (SEAFWA) Large Carnivore Working Group (LCWG) recently met in Asheville, North Carolina with Wildlife Management Institute (WMI) staff to launch a regional "BearWise" program aimed at reducing human-bear conflict. "BearWise" is being developed in response to the increasing frequency of encounters in southeastern states where both the human and black bear populations are growing. The program will use a website and other materials, developed by WMI using messages provided by the LCWG, as means to...

Over 800,000 acres were enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) during the most recent general sign-up period. This was the 49th general enrollment opportunity for the Program and one of the most selective in the 30-year history of CRP, according to the Wildlife Management Institute.

CRP was capped at 24 million acres for fiscal years 2017 and 2018 in the 2014 Farm Bill. As of last March, 23.8 million acres were enrolled with contracts on another 1.7 million acres set to expire in September. With farm commodity prices dipping, producer interest in CRP has been ramping...