National Wildlife Federation's Adopt-a-Wildlife-Acre program solves dangerous conflicts between wildlife and livestock across the western United States. With your help, we work to protect critical habitat for wild bighorn sheep, bison, grizzly bears, wolves, beavers and other threatened and endangered wildlife. To date, we have permanently protected over 1.7 million acres of land and have a goal of protecting 2 million additional acres of critical habitat over the next three years.
Public land and parks in the American West are home to some of the most magnificent animals in America. However, once iconic species like the gray wolf, grizzly bear, bighorn sheep and bison go to the borders of or leave the park their death rates rise dramatically! These animals' migration patterns take them where they are in close proximity to livestock grazing lands, this dangerous intersection poses serious mortality risk to both livestock and wildlife from conflict in these spaces.
NWF's Adopt-a-Wildlife-Acre program solves this conflict through a market-based approach. We compensate ranchers to retire high-risk grazing allotments and relocate their livestock to safe grazing lands. In addition we are removing and modifying private and public land fences that impede the movement of pronghorn, elk and mule deer. Finally, we are installing beaver dam analogs that mimic beaver dams and dramatically improve riparian and aquatic habitat, but also improve water quality.
This unique program recognizes the economic value of livestock grazing permits and compensates ranchers for retiring their leases. Each retirement requires voluntary participation from both public and private parties, and only happens when all are satisfied- a true win-win-win program! Thanks to our fence removal and modification, we are already seeing increases in pronghorn populations. Our work to recover beavers leading to measurable improvement in these populations.
This project has provided additional documentation in a DOCX file (projdoc.docx).
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