Helping to Develop the TN State Wildlife Action Plan

Helping to Develop the TN State Wildlife Action Plan

The State of Tennessee is in the final stages of completing the State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP), which will help guide where conservation dollars are spent for the next decade.  Many key conservation practitioners including Wolf River Conservancy have been convening and communicating with staff from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and The Nature Conservancy who are leading the charge.  Through a strategic geographic analysis, multiple environmental characteristics were distilled into a statewide heat map of high conservation areas.  Wolf River Conservancy made sure West Tennessee conservation values and especially wetlands were fairly assessed.  The Conservancy also pitched for aquifer recharge zones for the Memphis Sand Aquifer to be integrated into the analysis.  Datasets analyzed included but were not limited to rare species occurrences, climate resilience, and floodplains.  The final results identified key conservation opportunity areas (COAs), one of which is the entire Wolf River watershed.  We very much look forward to the completion and release of the 2025-2034 TN SWAP.

‍