From Conservation Incentives
Randy Browning is an expert in thinning forests, setting prescribed fires, controlling invasive vegetation with herbicides and using large equipment to prepare cut-over forests for tree planting. He spends much of his workday advising private landowners, and helping them write and implement forest management plans. You might think that he works for a forest products company, but you'd be wrong.
Browning, who hails from Texas but now calls Mississippi home, is employed by both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Mississippi Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a local conservation group that uses innovative strategies to protect the state's natural heritage. He is also the best friend the gopher tortoise, a federally threatened denizen of the longleaf pine ecosystem, ever had.
Browning is planting, herbiciding, thinning, scalping and dozing to restore longleaf pine, a fire-dependent tree that evolved in open forests maintained by wildfires. Some 70 to 90 million acres of longleaf pine once blanketed the southern coastal plain from southeastern Virginia to Florida and west to eastern Texas. Decades of unsustainable forest practices, agricultural conversion, fire suppression, commercial pine forest development and urbanization have reduced the longleaf pine forest by more than 95%. The gopher tortoise and at least 20 other endangered and threatened species rely on longleaf forests for their existence.
The restoration, conservation and management of those forests, about two-thirds of which occur on private lands, are critical to the survival of these rare species. In its official recovery plan for the gopher tortoise, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service notes that, "Private lands contain the vast majority of forest containing gopher tortoises. Accordingly, maintenance of the [gopher tortoise] population is not possible without some significant successes on privately owned timberlands." Though the species was listed as threatened in Louisiana, Mississippi and extreme southwestern Alabama in 1987, efforts on private lands have languished until recently. The change is due in large part to Randy Browning and the landowners working with him.
Browning is on the front line of a unique effort to use conservation incentives to protect and restore the gopher tortoise, the black pine snake and a suite of rare birds on private lands. In his dual role with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Mississippi Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Browning works alongside the American Forest Foundation, which promotes and certifies sustainable forest management on private lands, and Environmental Defense's Center for Conservation Incentives, which helped initiate the effort.
With funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Private Stewardship Grants (PSG) Program, Browning provides financial incentives to landowners to help cover habitat restoration costs. Over the last 18 months, that funding has totaled nearly $200,000 in cost-share monies to landowners to restore habitat on more than 2,000 acres. In addition, Browning shares his technical expertise on planting longleaf pine, reintroducing fire into longleaf forests and controlling cogongrass, an invasive plant that threatens the tortoise and the entire ecosystem.
The American Forest Foundation has also used PSG funding for landowner outreach. Last fall it hosted a workshop for about 75 Mississippi tree farmers and foresters and another is planned for this winter in Mississippi. With help from the American Bird Conservancy, the American Forest Foundation has published the Pine Ecosystem Conservation Handbook to provide information to family forest owners and others on the management of southern pine forests for both timber and wildlife benefits.
Safe Harbor and similar regulatory assurances for candidate species are an important part of this effort as well. Many longleaf landowners fear that managing their lands for the gopher tortoise or other endangered species might result in increased regulation under the Endangered Species Act. Such concerns should not be an issue. By entering Safe Harbor Agreements for the tortoise, the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker or the black pine snake (a candidate for listing) as part of their habitat restoration efforts, landowners ensure that their good deeds will not bring them increased legal responsibilities.
The first Safe Harbor Agreement for the tortoise is expected to be signed soon by Dr. John Lambert, a retired veterinarian and owner of 750 acres near Sumrall, Mississippi. Lambert, who hosted the American Forest Foundation's first workshop, is a former Mississippi Tree Farmer of the Year who is managing his lands for both timber production and longleaf restoration. And, not surprisingly, Randy Browning is there to help him get the job done.
