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The Healthy Lands Initiative

Photo: Nancy Warner

The Healthy Lands Initiative worked 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 wildlife migration corridor between Canada and the Columbia Plateau.

This eastern Washington project, led by the Institute for Rural Innovation and Stewardship, brought together the agricultural, land conservation, planning, and economic development communities to learn more about the biodiversity of the region, to assess existing and potential incentive programs, and to explore conservation tools and approaches, including habitat farming and grassbanking.

A one-page brief about this project is available here (pdf).

Key Accomplishments

• Created slide show and DVD, Nature of North Central Washington, with input and feedback from residents and ecologists.
  
  
• Analyzed available conservation incentives and developed slide show, Conservation and Agriculture: Moving beyond the traditional into the sustainable.
  
  
• Reached 300 community members in community dialogue process through focus groups and discussions.
  
  
• Organized a culminating forum with more than 60 attendees. This led to the formation of the Healthy Lands Coalition and a strategic plan.
  
  
• Convened a habitat farming work group, which developed a conceptual program that would pay farmers for growing riparian habitat.
  
  
• Facilitated grassbanking work groups and identified strategies for and barriers to grassbanks in north central Washington.

Lessons Learned

• Local production is valuable. Producing Nature of North Central Washington as a collective effort took a long time, but it allowed the slide show to reflect the contributions of many people. Even long-time residents learned something new and expressed an invigorated pride of place.
  
  
• Gaps exist in incentive programs. Analysis revealed that available incentive programs do not address invasive species, altered fire regimes, or climate change as the primary focus.
  
  
• Institutional challenges remain. The habitat farming program remains a case study of how slowly these things can move, even with willing participants, available funds, scoping, and a restoration plan.
  
  
• Balancing land uses is critical. Grassbank work groups clarified that the key to future efforts is making the case that livestock grazing can be compatible with wildlife needs.

Relationship with the Washington Biodiversity Conservatio Strategy

Several learnings from the project inform the recommendations put forth in the Washington Biodiversity Conservation Strategy:

• Growing conservation markets is slow, but the effort is a valuable learning process that will benefit future efforts.
  • Work to develop a habitat farming program in Chelan County—one that addresses economic, community, and ecological needs—requires that diverse partners share in the responsibilities associated with this complex project.
    
    
  • A desire for broadening partnerships led to joint proposal to the Ruckelshaus Center for Policy Consensus. This project is one of ten asked to submit a full proposal.

• Dialogue among landowners and incentives providers offers unexpected benefits.
  • Grassbank work group participants agreed that learning about grassbanks was valuable even though they decided not to pursue grassbanking at this time. Meeting with others to discuss landowner/producer needs, species needs, limitations, and opportunities was especially worthwhile.
    
    
  • Small focus groups are an effective tool for scoping out issues and identifying leaders.
    
    
  • The newly-formed Healthy Lands Coalition, a result of the community dialogue process, has several capacity-building charges. It plans to develop an education and outreach program to showcase and build upon local conservation successes.

• Raising awareness of biodiversity issues provides opportunities for valuable networking.
  • Nature of North Central Washington serves as a platform for complementary programs about, for example, individual counties or habitat types.
    
    
  • The slide show/DVD invites continuing input from community: information, images, and stories.

• Local needs give rise to citizen science initiatives.
  • The grassbank work groups clarified the need for a common language and protocol for monitoring and for sharing results of management actions in shrub-steppe habitats. This stimulated the creation of new partnerships to conduct rangeland monitoring workshops.
    
    
  • Student Achievement from the Ground Up, a program that brings landowners, teachers, and students together to monitor landscape change, has been launched with a coalition of partners in north central Washington.

Key Participants

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

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