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2021 Year in Review: Victories for People and Wildlife

Image Credit: Mac Stone

'Parcel by parcel, and partner by partner, OSI works to safeguard the natural places that sustain us all.'

The need to protect our nation’s precious natural resources has grown ever more pressing, and the Open Space Institute (OSI) is delivering real results – providing access to the outdoors for people of all backgrounds, protecting clean drinking water, stemming the effects of climate change, and providing critical wildlife habitat.

Parcel by parcel, and partner by partner, OSI works to safeguard the natural places that sustain us all. By the close of this year, OSI will add more than 25,000 acres to state and national parks and forests – conserving precious forests, wetlands, and recreational corridors throughout the eastern United States. In places far and wide, from the Adirondacks and the Hudson Highlands to Coastal Georgia and fast-developing South Carolina, OSI is protecting lands critical to life — ours and the planet’s.

Our continued success depends on your support. Please consider a year-end gift to help OSI protect the land you love and the land we need, and improve opportunities to explore trails and forests. Together we can continue to make a difference.

In 2021, with your support, OSI had many significant victories, including:

  • The return of Papscanee Island to the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community, some 400 years after their ancestors were painfully removed from the region (view the OSI Story Map and video);
  • The creation of Georgia’s Ceylon Wildlife Management Area, comprised of 27,000 OSI-protected acres that will provide wildlife habitat and critical coastal buffer for inland communities;
  • A historic deal with the State of New Jersey to purchase nine miles of former rail line to create a linear park across eight communities in the most densely populated region in the nation;
  • A community master planning to foster stronger local connections to South Carolina’s Black River and its planned 70-mile Black River Trail and Park Network (view the OSI Story Map and video);
  • Our Appalachian Landscapes Protection Fund, an $18 million initiative aimed at conserving 50,000 intact forested acres along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains for critical carbon storage;
  • The expansion of OSI’s Conservation Diversity Fellowship aimed at changing the face of conservation.

All in all, OSI’s work this year has produced consequential land protection in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maine, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Vermont. Click on the links below to learn more about our 2021 success.

Donate to Protect the Land You Love

Please consider a year-end gift to help continue our work protecting the land you love, and improving your access to it.

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2021 Year in Review: Protecting Watersheds and Drinking Water

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