Preservation is harder to see. It’s hard to notice the things that have NOT changed appreciably. But I’m happy to report INLT is increasingly adding to “clusters and corridors” of conserved land. So conservation is starting to “sprawl” by design. Let me explain.

Hindsight

INLT has always used conservation criteria to evaluate projects that find us, whether INLT is accepting donated easements, buying lands, or taking a pivotal role in partner projects. Sometimes it takes years for a Rotary Club slide show to pay off in a call, or for someone to get around to figuring out how they’re going to protect their land. INLT has also used science to figure out where we want to initiate projects. We’ve also seen the value of doing more and more projects in a given area over time, such as at Cougar Bay. Call it a focal area, or a “conservation cluster,” but the bottom line is that persistence does pay off.

For example, over the years INLT has helped protect 1,000 acres in the Little Spokane River watershed, one project at a time. From another angle, if you travelled on Highway 95 from Cougar Bay to Sandpoint today, if you knew where to look you’d now see a dozen INLT-protected lands “sprawling” within sight of the highway.

Back in 1997, INLT realized that it needed better science to map out areas where we should work proactively. That led to the “Threads of Hope” maps for Spokane county lands. Those maps told us where the blocks of good habitat were. It also told us where the corridors were that connected critical or already protected lands. Examples include the Deadman Creek/Peone Creek corridors that connect Mt Spokane State Park with the Little Spokane River.
INLT also worked closely with Avista to identify and acquire land along trout streams feeding Lake Pend Oreille. We knew that those stream corridors were incredibly important for all kinds of creatures, not just bull trout. Over time, more and more land along those streams has been protected.

Foresight

Looking ahead, INLT continues to evaluate projects that “come over the transom” to see if they are a good fit with our mission and stand on their own merits. Andrea, Drew and the Land Protection Committee also periodically refine our conservation strategies. We are always looking for ways to add to existing conservation clusters and corridors and to identify promising new ones. This is usually done on a county by county basis, e.g. the Wild Lifelines for Bonner, Kootenai, and Spokane counties. We also do it by land type, such as our Family Forests Forever program, and we’re considering initiatives to protect working farms, shrub-steppe lands, and possibly prime trout habitat and recreation access.

INLT also joins with 23 other land trusts spanning the Rockies in the “Heart of the Rockies” collaborative. Together we map out huge wildlife corridors, swaths of prime farmland, and blocks of forest land where together we can find willing landowners and outside funding. In the last six years this collaborative has more than doubled the pace of private land conservation in the Rockies, and INLT is proud to be a part of it.

Please continue to support Inland Northwest Land Trust. Thanks to you, a good kind of “sprawl” is happening all over our region.







Chris DeForest
Executive Director
509-328-2939
cdeforest@inlandnwlandtrust.org