Overview
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) launched the Central Appalachia Habitat Stewardship Program in 2017 in order to build on the success of two past species-focused business plan initiatives in the region — the eastern brook trout keystone initiative and the early successional forest initiative. These two business plans were exited after successfully demonstrating best practices and showing impact at a small scale. This new business plan and the Central Appalachia Habitat Stewardship Program are designed to take those successes to a landscape scale.
In partnership with the Richard King Mellon Foundation among others, the new program was developed based on a five-year, shared investment strategy for western Pennsylvania, guided by NFWF’s business planning model. The Richard King Mellon Foundation board adopted this investment strategy in March 2015. Subsequently, NFWF launched the Central Appalachia Habitat Stewardship Program with a mix of public and private funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the American Forest Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. Visit the NFWF Central Appalachia Habitat Stewardship Program homepage.