Private Land Stewardship Academies
Texas has a long history of private land ownership where 95 percent of the state is privately owned. The role of landowners as stewards of our state’s private lands and the public benefits derived from them is paramount. Most often successful land stewardship begins when natural resource professionals convey good land stewardship practices and techniques to private landowners.
As part of the Private Land Stewardship program and through collaboration with the Noble Foundation and East Foundation, NRI offers Private Land Stewardship Academies as a professional development opportunity to enhance natural resource professionals’ expertise in applying private land stewardship. These week-long, field-based academies are taught by leading experts in the field and review strategies for addressing private land challenges as well as current and future emerging issues in natural resources and private land conservation. The program offers valuable “hands-on” experiences to natural resource practitioners.
We have developed and hosted in partnership with the Center for Private Land Stewardship five Private Land Stewardship Academies. We hosted one academy for 13 Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service county agents, and one for 25 Texas NRCS conservationists. We also assisted Noble Foundation with three academies for 125 NRCS conservationists from 30 states.
In addition to in-person training as we adapt to the virtual learning landscape, NRI is building a community of practice around land stewardship for the outdoor enthusiasts and private landowners alike with mini-experiences and interactive publications developed from materials created during face-to-face training and presentations. These private land stewardship publications are meant for everyone from the classroom to the field. They meet the learner where and how they want to explore the information.
Since the launch of these interactive publications, we've seen our communities band together to recreate education so that it can be available in new ways. These virtual publications came about as a charge to take existing materials from previous presentations, from flash drives, or publications collecting dust on shelves, and shake them up so that anyone on the other side of a screen anywhere in the world could access them.
You can find and share these anytime. Click, open, explore, shuffle through the content and save up the information. You can quiz your knowledge gained at the end; a great component for classrooms and youth learning environments especially.
Vegetation and Landscape
Natural Resources Management
Wildlife
Threatened and Endangered Species
We'll continue to make these experience decks available to stewards of the land, wildlife and discovery to bridge the gap from urban and classroom audiences to rural communities and private land in Texas and beyond.