GRANT TARGETS PRESERVATION OF HABITATS

Monday, March 12, 2001
By ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian staff writer

    Riding momentum from a flurry of big-money grants and land donations over the past year, the Vancouver-based Columbia Land Trust announced it has received another $1.35 million toward the purchase of more than 1,300 acres of streamside property.

    The grants from the state Salmon Recovery Funding Board will help acquire property to benefit salmon on Grays River, near the mouth of the Columbia; in Brooks Slough on the Columbia between Cathlamet and Skamokawa; and on the Klickitat River, which feeds into the Columbia at Lyle.

    Dikes will be breached on the lower river properties to restore naturally functioning wetlands, and the purchase of 527 acres along the Klickitat ensures the area won't be degraded by development, according to the land trust.

    Glenn Lamb, the trust's executive director, said the organization conducted a study of about 100 watersheds emptying into the Columbia, and the Grays and Klickitat rivers ranked among the top 10 in terms of ecological importance.

    Not counting the most recent grant, the land trust has already more than doubled the acreage it has protected either through conservation easements or acquisition since January 2000. The decade-old organization says it has preserved 2,400 acres in various projects from the east end of the Columbia River Gorge to Willapa Bay and the Washington and Oregon coasts.

    Of that total acreage, 1,400 acres were preserved in the past year alone.

    "That's the remarkable thing," said Cherie Kearney, program director for the nonprofit organization. "For the first nine years, the local land trust here in Southwest Washington was serving primarily Clark County. We made a conscious decision to become a regional land trust for the entire region in 1998."

    The most recent grants will focus on the following areas:

• Grays River: The $615,500 grant from the state represents the second phase of a project in that area, enabling the land trust to acquire and restore 527 acres, reconnect ditched and diked floodplain and conserve 150 acres of old-growth spruce wetland. The total cost of the project amounts to $1.7 million, with $600,000 from private fund-raising, $485,000 from a federal wetlands reserve program and $20,000 worth of labor from Ducks Unlimited.
  
  
• Brooks Slough: The total cost of the restoration project between Cathlamet and Skamokawa amounts to $1.2 million, with the grant to the land trust totaling $408,000 to buy and restore 260 acres of diked and drained pasture. The federal wetland reserve program will contribute $750,000, and Ducks Unlimited will contribute $25,000 worth of labor.
  
  
• Klickitat River: The state gave $333,000 to the land trust to buy 580 acres along the Klickitat and a tributary, prime habitat for a threatened run of steelhead.

    The land trust's $1.35 million grant was part of more than $31.8 million distributed by the state's Salmon Recovery Funding Board for projects across Washington. The board, established in 1999 by the Legislature to distribute state and federal salmon recovery money, funded 147 individual projects.