2025 Midwest Fish & Wildlife Conference

AUTHORS: Michael Spalding, Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape and Conservation Law Center; Robert McCrea, Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape and Conservation Law Center

ABSTRACT: Sentinel Landscapes are areas where conservation, working lands, and national defense interests converge to work towards achieving mutually shared goals. They are anchored by at least one military installation and contain high priority lands for USDA, DOD, and DOI. Designated in 2022, the Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape (SISL) covers a 3.5-million-acre region of Southern Indiana. SISL Partners are working together to preserve and protect military missions, support sustainable farming and forestry, restore and sustain ecosystems, bolster human communities and partner capacity, and increase landscape resiliency. Our presentation will highlight several early successes of this young partnership that demonstrate how landscape level conservation is possible in a highly fragmented midwestern landscape (90% of the land in this area is privately owned). We will explain how the partnership leverages partner resources, utilizes federal funding opportunities, and develops innovative tools to build an overall program for landscape scale conservation. We will specifically discuss how the partnership: (1) utilizes the USDA NRCS Regional Conservation Partnership Program to increase private landowner engagement with conservation and permanently protect and restore over 2,500 acres of forestland through conservation easements, restore an additional 5,000 to 10,000 acres of oak-hickory forest ecosystems; (2) organizes projects for land protection with funding from The Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration Program; and (3) developed two GIS web-based applications. One assists private landowner access to all available cost share and technical assistance programs. The other helps SISL partners determine connectivity priorities for land conservation.