Category Overview
The State Lands Restoration and Enhancement category provides funding to two state agencies to help repair damaged plant and animal habitat. These grants focus on resource preservation and protection of public lands. Projects in this category help bring important natural areas and resources back to their original functions by improving the self sustaining and ecological functionality of sites.
Project Highlights
The Department of Natural Resources will use this grant to restore a prairie in the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve for recovering golden paintbrush, a plant threatened with extinction. Restoration work will include expanding the prairie by removing invasive species and trees. Native prairie species, including the paintbrush, will be propagated and replanted. Fencing, caging and snag development will all help reduce damage by deer and rodents. The preserve is one of only 11 sites in the world where golden paintbrush, a federally threatened, state endangered and globally imperiled species, survives. This preserve is one of the two largest remaining habitats for meeting federal and state recovery goals. Most remaining areas are less than 1 acre; this site includes 25 acres of prairie soils that could support the paintbrush. As a result of this project, prairie habitat will increase seven-fold from .5 acre to more than 3.5 acres, and the number of individual paintbrush plants will more than triple, from less than 100 to more than 350