The Nature Conservancy

And blacktip reef sharks cruising around the edges.

Now, Joe Pollock is a senior reef strategy lead at the Nature Conservancy, and he monitors the reefs.

And he describes corals so packed together that they're growing on top of one another, fighting over space.

That happens a lot when you have a healthy reef.

One of them is something you can push for in your own region this year.

And like the lessons of Palmyra are already traveling, which is great.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Stanford University and the Nature Conservancy built a framework called Super Reefs, and it looks at water conditions, currents, and coral genetics to find the reefs most likely to survive a hotter future, then focuses on protection and restoration in those areas.

Now, they're working with local partners in places like Maui and Belize, which is kind of cool to see.

The achievement reflects the importance of expanding and protecting backcountry trails.

The Nature Conservancy contributed funds toward the project and covered the costs of property appraisal and the phase one environmental study and survey.

Remaining costs were funded through the State Land Acquisitions Fund.

Conservationists made multiple attempts across many years to protect the Devil's Race Track.

Protection of this property will ensure future public access.

Moving to the Berkshires, more than 580 acres of land were recently conserved, creating opportunities for outdoor recreation while connecting thousands of acres of wildlife habitat and protected land.

The Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game and the Nature Conservancy are protecting 360 acres in Blanford, Massachusetts, as well as a 218-acre addition to the Chester-Blanford State Forest.

The Blanford property straddles the Massachusetts Turnpike and represents one of the few protected land connections across the heavily trafficked highway.

not making all the headlines that we've been getting? Well, maybe I'll keep a theme here with the outdoor spaces.

Before I joined the Community Foundation team, I spent seven years raising money for the Nature Conservancy of South Carolina.

The Nature Conservancy has a great series of preserves across the state of South Carolina and across the country.

But just here in Greenville County, in Northern Greenville County, there's the Blue Wall Preserve.

It's a great outdoor space, couple ponds on the property you can fish in.

Yeah, I remember when I worked down there meeting some Native American families and learning about them and their history, which was really cool.

Like I had mentioned about the bathrooms, Narrow River Land Trust maintains the trails, but I think this is all done in partnership with the Nature Conservatory.

It was a little confusing on their website.

Maybe it's the same thing.

and so creating these unique experiences was something that i was a part of but also my lane was helping grow this part of the business that was called good dog and the idea was that you would use the integrated marketing services and ability to help larger clients amtrak audi et cetera, et cetera, Fortune 500 clients and give that to more brands that were working in the conscious consumer space.

So this is going back like 15 plus years ago, right? The only most of the ways in which you could express your values buzz by giving to the Nature Conservancy, who was a client of ours, or WWF, or you could donate money, or you could go and shop at the Whole Foods or the natural store.

Maybe you could buy an electric car in those days.

There wasn't a lot of ways in which you could vote with your dollar.

You know, what's the market like? Where are they coming from? So making that publicly accessible has allowed us to help support a lot of those initiatives.

You mentioned the Keweenaw Heartlands Project was just an incredible program led by the Nature Conservancy in which we're truly establishing Michigan's first community owned recreation forest authority.

What is that? That's a 32,000 acre public private partnership with the state of Michigan where the community literally owns a massive forest and they get to make decisions on how that's managed, both good and bad.

We have an incredible election season coming up where board members are going to be elected.

Scientists have identified four major conservation focus areas, including the Amazon Rainforest and the Appalachian Mountains.

The Nature Conservancy has made a quarter million acres of the Cumberland Forest a priority for withstanding future climate change.

Some 30,000 acres are in Kentucky's Bell County, where John Grace is the tourism director.

There's a lot of people that shot their first deer up there, that caught their first fish out of one of the ponds or the streams.

You're listening to It's In Our Nature, the podcast that celebrates the connections between people and nature with host Adam McLane, The Nature Conservancy's Missouri State Director.

For more information, visit nature.org forward slash Missouri.

Hi everyone.

I'm Adam McLane with The Nature Conservancy and welcome back to It's In Our Nature.

This is a special year for us.

We're celebrating two major milestones, 75 years of the Nature Conservancy as a global organization and 70 years of conservation here in Missouri.

That is a lot of history.

Thousands of people, millions of acres protected worldwide, countless partnerships and some really remarkable stories.