$3.5 million Awarded for Prairie Protection through DoD REPI Program

Joint Base Lewis-McChord with the Center for Natural Lands Management and Partners was recently awarded $3.5 million by the Department of Defense’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration Program (REPI). The funds will go towards efforts to preserve, restore, and manage critical prairie habitat in the South Puget Sound region, which will help preserve the environment while providing regulatory flexibility for on-base training.

The REPI project will help preserve and manage critical prairie habitat across the South Sound (photo: Adam Martin).

The award is being leveraged almost 2½:1 by a partnership that includes Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Center for Natural Lands Management, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA NRCS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), Thurston County, the state of Washington, and private landowners.

“This award shows we have the ability to balance critical prairie habitat conservation efforts with the needs of Joint Base Lewis-McChord. It’s great news for JBLM, private landowners, conservationists, and all of Thurston County. We should look towards this award and the partnership that is leveraging it as a model of future prairie habitat conservation efforts in the South Puget Sound,” said Congressman Heck, who represents the district that contains Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

The REPI project will bring together a diverse array of agencies and organizations in the private and public sector to protect rare prairie species (Photo: Rod Gilbert).

The JBLM REPI project will help the conservation community, Thurston County, and agricultural/ranching partners develop and demonstrate a suite of components needed for recovery of prairie species proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and provides security for future conservation actions. This one-year grant will bring an additional $3.5 million dollars to South Sound for land acquisition, stewardship endowments, and complementary actions to benefit prairie habitats and the rare prairie species proposed for listing.  In addition to DoD, the project has benefitted from great support from local partners including Thurston County, FWS, NRCS, and regional Congressional staff.

The Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) Program allows the Military Services to enter into cost-sharing partnerships with state and local governments and private conservation organizations to preserve compatible land uses and conserve natural landscapes in support of military readiness. The REPI program has protected 264,000 acres of buffer land at 66 locations in 24 states across the country.

REPI Fact Sheet

Article in the Olympian

Wildfire Training at Eglin Air Force Base

Mason McKinley recently went to Florida for a training exchange at Eglin Air Force Base. Read his firsthand account of his experience.

It was only my second day at Eglin, and we received a report of smoke on the installation from the civil air patrol. I had been designated in a trainee position to lead any wildfire initial attacks. It was the end of the normal workday, and the crew was just returning from an 800 acre controlled burn. We rounded up our initial attack crew of three and headed out to find the wildfire.

Mason McKinley working on his ICT4 qualifications at Eglin AFB (photo: Mason McKinley).

What was I doing at Eglin AFB on the Florida Panhandle? Eglin was recently recognized as the military’s center for excellence in wildland fire. This designation recognizes and strengthens the base’s emphasis on providing training for firefighters from across the nation. Our connection with Joint Base Lewis-McChord enabled me to spend the two weeks training at Eglin to become an Incident Commander Type 4 (ICT4).

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CPOP's Impact on the Prairie Oak Community

Imagine being a land manager in British Columbia, trying to coordinate a release of Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies. You have to find a site, integrate the butterflies into a long-term management plan for the site, prepare the release area over many years by removing invasives and planting native nectar and host species, find seeds or plugs of these plants, find an organization to grow checkerspot larvae (or decide to grow your own stock), potentially deal with the logistics of transporting animals over international borders, have the larvae available in advance, release the larvae, conduct monitoring and continued restoration in the future, and of course obtain funding for each of these processes. Quite a lot of coordination! And these are only a few of the steps involved in a butterfly reintroduction.

Attendees of the recent conference examined oak release efforts during a bird and restoration field trip to Basket Slough NWR (photo: Hannah Anderson).

Enter CPOP. CPOP, or the Cascadia Prairie Oak Partnership serves a community of people that are either personally or as representatives of an organization involved in prairie-oak conservation and species recovery efforts. CPOP helps increase coordinated project planning, share information, and tackle conservation challenges by facilitating communication, information-sharing, and collaborative action between different locales within the ecoregion, between agencies and organizations across political boundaries, and between policy makers and land managers.

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Quarterly Highlights

Camas is starting to bloom at some of our sites (photo by Adam Martin).

The CNLM Washington office has been working on many different exciting projects this spring. In partnership with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, we released over 3000 checkerspot larvae at Glacial Heritage in late February. We purchased a property in the Elwah Basin that is an occupied Taylor's checkerspot site. In the past few weeks, we have started working with a Department of Corrections Community Crew who will be exclusively be dedicated to working on prairie habitat restoration. We recently attended the Cascadia Prairie Oak Parternship Conference in Portland, attended by over 200 people. To read about all these projects and more, check out our most recent edition of our quarterly highlights.