Funding will assist consider, unify, and scale this system within the Northeast and Midwest
The National Audubon Society just lately acquired $2 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service to assist the Bird-Friendly Maple program. The investment is a part of $145 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding to attach landowners to rising local weather markets. Funding will assist increase this system with a give attention to partaking small-acreage non-public landowners in sustainable forestry practices.
“Through Audubon’s Bird-Friendly Maple program, maple producers in the U.S. can commit to sustainable forest management practices that support bird conservation. The USDA grant funding will allow us to scale up the program which started in Vermont in 2014 and empower more small landowners across the Northeast and Midwest to participate in the emerging bird-friendly maple syrup market. This will have a significant impact on how forests and songbirds like Scarlet Tanagers and Wood Thrushes can thrive and adapt to a changing climate,” stated Jillian Liner, Director of Conservation for Audubon Vermont.
“Sugarbushes don’t just make for great maple syrup: they provide important nesting and foraging habitat for over thirty birds including declining songbirds like the Eastern Wood Pewee and Veery. On a wider scale, healthy forested landscapes provide benefits like carbon sequestration and storage and watershed protection. By creating a more structurally and biologically diverse sugarbush, maple producers can play a vital role in conservation that benefits birds and people,” stated Suzanne Treyger, Senior Forest Program Manager for Audubon Connecticut and New York.
Audubon’s Bird-Friendly Maple program is a market-based method that incentivizes maple producers to handle their sugarbush (a forest stand that consists of principally sugar maple tree species) in assist of hen habitat and forest resilience by means of distinctive product labeling and advertising and marketing alternatives. Through the USDA Forest Service funding, Audubon and Virginia Tech will consider, unify, and scale this system within the Northeast (Vermont, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maine) and Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin) in partnership with Maine Audubon, Food Alliance, and Vermont Northeast Organic Farming Association.
“As we’ve learned in other contexts, listening to landowners is the foundation of a successful private lands conservation project. Developing projects with them ensures that they will have lasting benefits for people, habitat, and birds,” stated Ashley Dayer, Associate Professor within the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech.
The way forward for forest birds and the maple sugaring business are tightly linked: the identical northern hardwood forests that provide almost half of all U.S. maple syrup annually are additionally home to among the highest range and abundance of breeding birds within the continental United States. Through utilized forest administration, acknowledged bird-friendly maple producers work to enhance habitat high quality of their sugarbushes to optimize breeding and foraging alternatives for forest birds in decline. This natural climate solution can take in greenhouse gases and naturally retailer carbon, making forests extra resilient whereas lowering local weather dangers.
For extra details about this conservation initiative, go to the Audubon Connecticut, Audubon New York, and Audubon Vermont program pages. Participating retailers could be discovered on the Audubon Marketplace page.
About Audubon:
The National Audubon Society is a nonprofit conservation organization that protects birds and the locations they want at the moment and tomorrow. We work all through the Americas in direction of a future the place birds thrive as a result of Audubon is a strong, numerous, and ever-growing pressure for conservation. Audubon has greater than 700 employees working throughout the hemisphere and greater than 1.5 million lively supporters. North America has misplaced three billion birds since 1970, and greater than 500 hen species are liable to extinction throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Birds act as early warning techniques concerning the well being of our surroundings, they usually inform us that birds – and our planet – are in disaster. Together as one Audubon, we’re working to change the course of local weather change and habitat loss, resulting in more healthy hen populations and reversing present tendencies in biodiversity loss. We do that by implementing on-the-ground conservation, partnering with native communities, influencing public and company coverage, and building group. Learn extra at www.audubon.org and on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @audubonsociety.
Photo at high: Scarlet Tanager. Photo Credit: Russel Smith/Audubon Photography Awards.
