As we celebrated the holidays with fellow Mass Audubon staff, Jeff Collins received an email announcing that a large Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) grant that our team and partners applied for had been approved!
About $6.1 million will be used to protect and manage forests in the Southern New England Heritage Forest. The area is bounded by Hartford and Springfield in the west, Providence in the east, and runs from the Long Island sound north to the Quabbin reservoir. This region contains a critically important continuous corridor of high-priority forested wildlife habitat.
Over 70% of these woodlands are privately owned, so this grant will focus on engaging
landowners and helping them maintain their forests as forests through sound management and— whenever possible—permanent protection.
Mass Audubon’s role in this grant is to assist project partners’ efforts by providing bird habitat recommendations for forest management plans, training more technical service providers (TSPs) to incorporate birds in their work, increasing TSP registration numbers, and conducting wildlife monitoring on managed sites. Our team will also teach landowners about bird-friendly forest management.
The project will begin in the spring of 2018 and run for five years.
