Funding

Transborder Fund

Photo Credit: Brett Cole

One of the world’s largest remaining temperate forests – the Northern Appalachian/Acadian eco-region – stretches across eastern North America along the U.S. and Canadian border. Recognizing the need for better coordination across national boundaries, our Transborder Land Protection Fund encourages organizations and government agencies in both countries to plan and act together to preserve the region’s ecological networks.

Why Transborder Land Protection Fund

The great forest along the spine of the northern Appalachians encompasses vast river systems, fresh and salt-water wetlands, and headlands jutting into productive bays and inlets. Its woods, wetlands, and waterways still harbor most the species found here in colonial times.

The region’s species diversity depends on protecting and connecting core habitats across the region and across the US-Canadian border. After all, national boundaries mean nothing to the area’s animals and plants.

To encourage collaboration between the two countries and maximize the resources for conserving these key linkages, in 2009 we launched our Transborder Land Protection Fund, with generous support from the Partridge Foundation. The fund builds on our conservation work in New England, where we have helped finance the protection of more than a million acres of forestland, and are currently protecting wildlife habitat and supporting community forests.

Impact of the Fund

With relatively small support grants to conservation partners in both countries, OSI has propelled important conservation projects as well as spurred collaboration across the border among public and nonprofit agencies. Thanks to the vision and generous support of the Partridge Foundation, as of January 2017, with 28 grants totaling $1.875 million, the Fund assisted in the protection of 44,230 acres (17,899 hectares) of exceptional wildlife habitat in three states and three provinces.

In the sweep of forest from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont through New Hampshire to Maine and Quebec, we supported several major transactions that preserved large, ecologically significant tracts and watersheds. We helped bridge numerous gaps along the chain of mountains from southern Quebec to northern Vermont. With grants to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, we protected five critical parcels on the Chignecto Isthmus, a narrow land bridge and wildlife corridor between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

By providing critical matching grants for projects on both sides of the border and by encouraging shared research and planning among organizations and government agencies, the Fund has been a catalyst for conserving the larger transborder region.

Read the report detailing Transborder Land Protection Fund accomplishments (in French and English).

An OSI Transborder grant helped preserve Orbeton Stream, prized for its eastern brook trout and Atlantic salmon: in 2007 salmon reared in the Orbeton watershed returned from the North Atlantic Ocean for the first time in 150 years. These wildlife resources are now forever conserved by the Trust for Public Land and rhe State of Maine.

Fund Criteria

Projects must permanently protect wildlife habitat, either by creating or enlarging existing preserves or by buffering and/or connecting habitat, in the provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The Fund gives preference to areas identified as key linkages by Two Countries, One Forest, a Canadian-US scientific and conservation collaboration to conserve the forests and natural heritage of the Northern Appalachian/Acadian ecoregion.

Preference is given to projects that:

Are undertaken in partnership by Canadian and US organizations.
Achieve significant scale, either by themselves or together with other projects and/or existing protected land.
Are located near the border of the US and Canada;
Illustrate the value of transborder conservation.
Catalyze other significant transactions, constituency and public and private funding for transborder conservation.

The objectives of the Fund are to protect lands that:

Serve ecological functions that cross the border, such as wildlife corridors.
Are located proximate to the international border (consideration also given to projects in critical linkages that are near or across state and provincial jurisdictions).
Engage local constituencies.
Serve as models for other land conservation efforts.
Will be catalyzed or propelled by the Fund’s investment.

In addition, projects should:

Achieve significant immediate financial leverage.
Demonstrate an urgency and/or timeliness in proceeding, where there is significant but manageable threat.
Be completed within 18 months of receiving a grant award,
Be spearheaded by organizations with the capacity and financial ability to execute the transaction and ensure stewardship/management of the protected property.
Be executed in a cost-effective manner.

Grant opportunities

The Fund offers grants and loans to protect lands, through fee purchase, conservation easements and servitudes, that integrate the protection of the Northern Appalachian/Acadian eco-region (see map). Grants are primarily provided for transactional expenses, including appraisals, environmental assessments, options and stewardship costs; we provide capital grants only in exceptional circumstances, for example, where there is urgent need and our support can kick-start a project and/or trigger significant other matching public and private dollars. The Fund may also provide short-term low-interest loans, for projects meeting our criteria, that bridge public and private funding.