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Building a Conservation Economy in North Central Washington
(06/15/06)

Photo: Nancy Warner

For an update on this project,
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The Council’s Eastern Washington pilot project is intended to develop a shared community vision for how biodiversity conservation can be integrated with the economic and social needs of the North Central Washington region, including Okanogan, Douglas, and Chelan Counties, and the Colville Indian Reservation.

This area is very rich in biodiversity and ecological function, and it provides a major migration corridor between Canada and the Columbia Plateau.

The project, led by the Institute for Rural Innovation and Stewardship, will bring together the land conservation, agricultural, and economic development communities to learn more about the biodiversity of the region, to assess existing and potential incentive programs, and to apply new conservation approaches, including habitat farming and grassbanking in Moses Coulee, the Methow Valley, and the Wenatchee River watershed.

Project partners include: The Nature Conservancy, the North Central Washington Resource Conservation and Development Council, the Okanogan Conservation District, the Foster Creek Conservation District, and the Community Foundation of North Central Washington.  

This project comes at a critical time for North Central Washington because the traditional rural economic base of the region is changing, as it is in other parts of rural Washington. Two general paths are available to this community: it can either begin subdividing its agricultural lands into second homes for urban dwellers and build an economy around the needs of a new population, or it can try to maintain its existing biodiversity and agricultural land base by finding ways to increase farm income.

One way to raise income is to focus on the production of diversified and high-value goods and services (including tourism). Higher income for farmers would allow them to resist offers from developers. Better information for communities, in the form of biodiversity assessments and resources for conservation, would allow them to establish conservation priorities and chart their futures.

This project includes the following objectives:

• Building a collective understanding of the biodiversity of the region.
• Creating a collective understanding of the regional tools and resources available for enhancing conservation.
• Discovering new ways of combining biodiversity conservation with the maintenance of productive and profitable agricultural enterprises.
• Assessing how new and existing incentive programs could benefit riparian and shrub-steppe habitat in the Wenatchee River watershed, Moses Coulee, and the Methow Valley.
• Evaluating, synthesizing, and sharing results of the pilot project with neighboring North Central Washington communities and other regions of the state.

Several assessments of the region’s biodiversity are nearing completion, including ecoregional assessments for each of the three ecoregions that converge in North Central Washington: North Cascades, East Cascades, and Okanogan.

Definitions:

Habitat farming:  An approach to farming that rewards farmers for growing habitat. For example, a project in Chelan County is exploring creating and managing a voluntary program that would provide farmers with appropriate economic return for growing and maintaining riparian habitat as an alternative to traditional crops. >back

Grassbank: A partnership that leverages conservation practices across multiple land ownerships based on the exchange of forage for tangible conservation benefits. A grassbank(external link) can also refer to a physical place where cattle are temporarily located to feed on forage while home rangelands are undergoing restoration and conservation activities. A grassbanker refers to those who participate in a grassbank process either as a rancher who has decided to exchange forage for conservation on their home range or as a participant in a committee that establishes and oversees a grassbank. >back

Ecoregional assessment:  A systematic analysis of habitat and species  information combined with data on human impacts within an ecoregion that leads to the identification of relatively intact areas that, if conserved, will help to sustain the ecoregion's biodiversity into the future. >back

Ecoregion: A large geographic area that shares similar geologic history, climate, habitat types, and native species.  Increasingly, conservation biologists are viewing their work in the context of ecoregions, since ecoregions provide an analytical framework based not on jurisdictional boundaries, but on the geography of landscape and biology.  There are nine ecoregions in Washington State. >back

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