The US Fish and Wildlife Service has announced the opening of a new nature reserve in the Willamette Valley.
The purchase of 600 acres of wetland outside Brownsville served as a prelude to the larger Willamette Valley Nature Preserve announced last week.
The project manager for the area, Damien Miller, said it would create a boundary within which the agency could purchase or manage private lands to protect endangered habitats and species.
“In the Willamette Valley, only two percent of the original prairie remains, and due to habitat loss, several threatened and endangered species have been listed here,” Miller said.
The USFWS said it worked with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, as well as local tribes, landowners and cooperatives, to determine the project and its goals.
The project is expected to benefit oak and prairie habitats, as well as species such as the endangered Willamette daisy and the threatened Fender Blue butterfly, an animal that Miller said has already benefited from previous conservation efforts.
“Through our conservation efforts in collaboration with other partners, the species has been recovered to the point where its status has been downgraded from ‘critically endangered’ to ‘vulnerable,'” he said.
In total, the agency wants to acquire 22,650 acres within the boundary. That’s the amount of protected land needed to stabilize habitat, according to the results of an internal USFWS study.
However, Miller said those areas may not be connected in one large strip. He said the agency is trying to “acquire only the most important parcels – more of a patchwork of small parcels around the valley.”
The Willamette Valley Conservation Area is the 572nd facility in the national Wildlife Refuge System.
It will be the fourth member of the larger Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex, which also includes the Ankeny, Baskett Slough and William L. Finley refuges.
For more information about the newly established nature reserve, visit the Willamette Valley Conservation Area Land protection plan.
