AgriLife Today: Natural Resources Institute aids in Florida gopher tortoise recovery
Collaborative effort celebrates recent achievements and outlines future goals.
Posts tagged with military land sustainainability. View all posts
Collaborative effort celebrates recent achievements and outlines future goals.
A keystone species found in the southeastern U.S., the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) was listed as threatened in the western part of its range in 1987 and warranted for listing as threatened in the eastern part of its range in 2011, primarily due to the destruction and fragmentation of its native habitat. These findings prompted action among conservation groups to begin captive breeding or relocation programs to bolster population numbers and ensure that existing populations have safe habitats.
NRI’s latest web tool, the Texas Airspace Planning and Forecasting Tool, provides a comprehensive solution for planners. Employing easy-to-navigate functionality, the tool combines those military installation fence lines on the ground and airspace boundaries over head with forecasted land development data up to year 2050.
NRI developed several reports and web tools to assist installation personnel and community stakeholders in addressing various aspects of encroachment issues facing Texas installations from airspace, land and threatened and endangered species forecasting.
Join the REPI office for this online series highlighting best practices, knowledge sharing and tutorials on REPI partnership efforts that support military missions, accelerate the rate of conservation, and promote military installation and community resilience.
A first-in-the-nation conservation plan, crafted by the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and wildlife agencies in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, protects at-risk gopher tortoises while helping military bases to continue training and testing missions across the tortoise’s Southern turf.
Texas A&M Institute of Renewable Natural Resources (IRNR) military land sustainability (MLS) program is playing an integral role in the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership, an initiative between the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the U.S. Department of the Interior, according to Bruce Beard, associate director for IRNR’s MLS program.