6.3 Conservation Opportunities and Incentives
• Many wildlife species are declining due to a lack of properly managed early succes- sional habitat. Te Cooperative Upland habitat Restoration and Enhancement (CURE) program is designed to increase early successional habitats and improve associated wildlife populations (including small game and songbirds) on private land in North Carolina. Te CURE Program aims to create enough early successional habitat on private land cooperatives (>5,000 acres) to have a measurable impact on local wildlife populations. Trough the CURE program, NCWRC ofers guidance, labor, and fnancial assistance to qualifed landowners. Te Farm Bill conservation incentives programs are also employed to implement CURE. Te Commission has identifed “focal areas” for early successional habitat work within the Piedmont and upper Coastal Plain for the CURE program. Tese focal areas contain landscapes that are considered to provide the greatest potential for early successional habitat management on private lands and should be used to prioritize and focus other early successional habitat initiatives. Furthermore, conservation eforts should be geo- graphically clustered, to the extent possible, to create larger areas of contiguous early successional habitat. Farm Bill programs, administered by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, ofer many conservation incentive cost-share funds. Tese programs are subject to change depending on modifcations to the Farm Bill. Tere are numerous programs that improve management of wildlife habitat and water quality for lands in agricultural and forestry production, including: • Te Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) and the Agriculture Cost-Share Program (ACSP). Tese programs are joint eforts among state and federal agencies administered by the NC Division of Soil and Water Conservation to address water quality problems. Tey are voluntary programs that seek to protect land currently in agricultural production along watercourses. • One of the newest programs is the Regional Conservation Partnership Program. RCPP combines four former conservation programs, including two that were applied in North Carolina—the Agricultural Water Enhancement Program and the Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative (CCPI). Assistance is delivered in accordance with the rules of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), ACEP, and Healthy Forests Reserve Program (HFRP), and in certain areas, the Watershed Operations and Flood Prevention Program. Nearly $400 million in funding for RCPP was available in the 2014/15 cycle. Successful applicants enter into partnership agreements with NRCS under RCPP. Additionally, EQIP now con- tains the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP).
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2015 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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