Climate Change | What We Are Doing
Natural Land Institute (NLI) has been protecting and preserving land since 1958. In fact, we have protected 19,000 acres during this time, which includes forests and prairies, wetlands and stream corridors.
Nygen Wetland Preserve (Rockton, Illinois), a 721-acre wildlife refuge, is former farmland with a complex of wetlands, prairies and woodlands that we purchased in 2000 and started restoring immediately. The wetlands help reduce flooding downstream of the Rock River. Large prairies around the preserve act as carbon sinks. The woodlands also help sequester carbon.
We are creating a major complex of grassland bird habitat in northern Winnebago County (Illinois) with 387 acres of mostly grassland bird habitat and some woodland areas at Lost Flora Fen on Raccoon Creek. We added another 326 acres to this complex with a new property called the Jerry and Kathy Busse Prairie Preserve on Raccoon Creek in late 2024. This property that straddles the Illinois and Wisconsin stateline includes grassland, wetlands, ponds, and Raccoon Creek running through it. With the grassland areas of these two properties the prairie plants are helping sequester a large amount of carbon dioxide. The roots of native prairie/grassland plants pull carbon into their root biomass and keep it underground even better that trees! There are old growth trees in the western part of Lost Flora Fen and we plan to restore that area to provide a healthier forest because the old trees have a very high value for sequestering carbon.
Other preserves with old growth trees that are owned by NLI are Lind-McGeachie Preserve, Burr Oak Valley Nature Preserve, and William & Gayle Keefer Nature Reserve.
See also this article: Carbon Sequestration in Grasslands
See NLI’s Strategic Conservation Plan
Download Plan: https://www.naturalland.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Strategic-Conservation-Plan_NLI-2023-web.pdf
Audubon’s Bird Report
The 2022 U.S. State of the Birds Report Reveals Widespread Losses of Birds in All Habitats – Except for One
Download Report: https://www.audubon.org/news/2022-us-state-birds-report-reveals-widespread-losses-birds-all-habitats-except