The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced the opening of a new conservation area in the Willamette Valley.
The purchase of 600 acres of wetlands outside of Brownsville served as the commencement of the broader Willamette Valley Conservation Area, which was announced last week.
The project manager for the area, Damien Miller, said it will provide a boundary in which the agency can buy or manage privately-owned land, in an effort to protect at-risk habitats and species.
“There’s only 2% of the native prairie that remains in the Willamette Valley, and there's several threatened and endangered species that have been listed here because of that habitat loss,” said Miller.
USFWS said to establish the project and its goals, it collaborated with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, as well as local tribes, landowners and cooperatives.
The project seeks to benefit oak and prairie habitats, along with species like the endangered Willamette daisy, and the threatened Fender’s Blue Butterfly—an animal that has already benefited from past protections, according to Miller.
“Through our conservation efforts working with the other partners, that species has been recovered to the point where it was downlisted from endangered to threatened,” he said.
Overall, the agency aims to acquire 22,650 acres within the boundary. That’s the amount of protected land needed to stabilize the habitat, according to the results of an internal study from the USFWS.
However, Miller said these areas may not be connected in one large swath. He said the agency is seeking to acquire “just the key parcels—more like a patchwork of little parcels around the valley.”
The Willamette Valley Conservation Area is the 572nd installation in the national Wildlife Refuge System.
It will join as the fourth member of the greater Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex, which also includes the Ankeny, Baskett Slough, and William L. Finley Refuges.
More information about the newly-instated conservation area can be found in the Willamette Valley Conservation Area Land Protection Plan.
