The Nature Conservancy and the Missouri Department of Conservation teamed up three decades ago to protect 80,000 acres of Ozark forests.
PUTTING THE PUZZLE TOGETHER The Nature Conservancy and the Missouri Department of Conservation teamed up three decades ago to protect 80,000 acres of Ozark forests. In 1991, an irreplaceable swath of Ozark forests was in
At the time, TNC’s preserves across Missouri totaled a few thousand widely scattered acres, and there was no way it could manage the tens of thousands of acres needed to keep the forests intact. Government conservation agencies at work in the Ozarks had a different problem: They had the capacity to own and manage vast tracts in perpetuity, but they could not move as fast as commercial buyers in the market. All the land would be gone by the time their funding was approved. So TNC and MDC teamed up once again. In a few weeks’ time, they structured a deal to buy 80,934 acres of the property owned by Kerr-McGee Corporation, an Oklahoma- based chemical and oil company. Kerr-McGee agreed to sell the property at $4 million less than its appraised value, and Commerce Bank agreed to lend TNC the majority of the funds at below-market rates. At the time, it was described as a “landmark deal,” and it highlighted the strength of a public-private partnership. TNC was the initial buyer, but what it was really buying was time for all the plants and animals that depend on that part of the Ozarks. During the next five years, the Conservancy would transfer roughly 75,000 acres to MDC at cost, which allowed the state to permanently protect it and begin restoration work.
danger. One of the last big commercial timberland owners in Missouri was divesting, which meant between 100,000 and 200,000 acres were hitting the market. “The Nature Conservancy became very intrigued with that and scrambled to figure out how we could do something,” says Doug Ladd, TNC’s former director of conservation in Missouri. TNC knew the area well. The Conservancy and Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) had previously teamed up to survey biodiversity in the state with an eye toward identifying priorities for large-scale conservation. “Out of that emerged that the Current River watershed was clearly one of the most significant areas in Middle America and was of global conservation significance,” Ladd says. If past sales in the region were any indication, much of the land would be divided into a series of small plots. Conservationists’ biggest concerns were about what would happen next. Secondary deals had followed similar sales, with new owners immediately selling off all the timber to recoup their costs. Such deals could yield one-time profits, but the plot-by-plot clear-cutting would punch holes in the broad tapestry of forests, glades and fens, forever fragmenting an ecosystem that was unlike any on Earth.
The 1991 deal was emblematic of the role TNC continues to play throughout the Ozarks. “It has never been The Nature Conservancy’s goal to be the biggest landowner in a region,” says TNC’s Missouri State Director Adam McLane. “Our strength as an organization is really as a problem solver—being nimble enough, thanks to our donors and partners, to seize opportunities to protect Missouri’s critical conservation interests.” The idea is to be a piece of the bigger puzzle of Ozarks conservation strategies, whether that’s owning and restoring land or facilitating others’ efforts. The 1991 purchase highlighted a mixture of approaches. It made it possible for MDC to buy those 75,000 acres, which the department combined with nearby state properties to create three sprawling conservation areas: Sunklands, Angeline and Rocky Creek. Each is about 40,000 acres and tie into an even broader mix of protected lands in and around the Current River. The deal also allowed TNC to hold onto any portion of the 80,000 acres that it chose. As part of that selection process, Ladd and Blane Heumann, a TNC scientist who is now the Conservancy’s director of fire management, partnered with two scientists from the Morton Arboretum near Chicago on a rapid assessment of the larger property. Kerr-McGee had operated the land as a commercial forest, and the area reflected the effects of that use. But the existing biodiversity surprised the scientists. They homed in on a particularly rich 5,600 acres along Chilton Creek in the Current River watershed. Most of the pines noted in an 1821 land survey were gone, but the researchers reported more than 500 species of flowering plants. That was nearly a third of all the known species in the entire state.
“No other area of this size in the lower Ozarks is known to have this diversity of vascular plant species,” they reported at the time. TNC named the new property Chilton Creek Research and Demonstration Area. In a 1993 newsletter, TNC’s state board chair at the time, Michael Keathley, described it as “a living laboratory to learn about many processes vital to both biodiversity conservation and regional quality of life.” For the next three decades, the preserve lived up to its name. Among multiple research projects on the site, TNC along with MDC and others studied the restorative benefits of controlled burns at Chilton, manipulating the frequency of fires on different plots to see what was most effective. The research was a companion to the Missouri Ozark Forest Ecosystem Project (MOFEP), a century-long study of the
properties and resell them to new owners who agree to maintain the ecological integrity of the land. The fund ensures properties stay on the tax rolls and will be sustainably managed in private forests and recreational grounds. That benefits watersheds, ecosystems and wildlife, as well as local economies. The fund also feeds into itself. Money from the sales goes toward buying and protecting more properties. So far, the fund has permanently protected about 12,000 acres in the Ozarks. Due to the collaborative efforts of multiple parties in the Ozarks, nearly half of the land in the Current’s watershed is protected, much of it contiguous. “We need these big, wide areas,” says Terry Thompson, MDC’s Regional Resource Management Unit supervisor for the Ozark Region. “They are a corridor and help from having fragmentation for certain species.”
effects on the wider forest of different types of management through timber harvesting, and it followed the same rigorous monitoring. The burned plots showed the growth of ground flora at rates that were multiple times those of control plots. In November 2022, TNC transferred Chilton to MDC. The sale to the state ensures the property, which becomes part of Peck Ranch, will always be managed for conservation and forever connected to other managed lands through the Current River watershed. It also gives TNC money to reinvest in more work in the Ozarks and across the state. TNC also operates the Howard and Joyce Wood Ozarks Conservation Buyer Fund—an innovative tool that allows TNC to buy vulnerable land around the Current and Jacks Fork rivers, add permanent conservation easements on the
Elk are one example. Once common in Missouri, elk disappeared from the state little more than 100 years after the first permanent European settlement was established in Missouri. MDC has led an effort to reintroduce elk. It would not work with small, isolated forests here and there. The famously long-ranging animals need room to wander in search of food and water. Keeping the watershed intact allows that to happen. Daniel Drees, a fire ecologist with the National Parks Service Ozark Highlands Park Group who is based in Van Buren, says the same is true for restoration. Conservation agencies working in the Current River watershed have learned that controlled burns at the landscape scale yield benefits that do not happen at a smaller scale. Many species of plants and animals have adapted over thousands of years to spread across large expanses, and that ability can be crucial to their survival. He gives the example of the collared lizards that live in glades in the watershed. The research of Washington University Professor, and former TNC Trustee, Alan Templeton found that landscape- scale controlled burns, covering whole mountains in the Ozarks, caused the kind of wide-ranging restoration that allowed collared lizards to spread across the region. Without it, they tended to isolate in small areas where they could be wiped out by greater roadrunners or other hazards. Researchers realized other species benefited in the same way. Large, unbroken stretches of habitat give them routes to escape to more hospitable conditions, whether that is a hideout from hungry birds or a hillside with a little more sunlight and water.
Such lessons can transfer far beyond the Ozarks to other imperiled landscapes, and they were made possible through collaboration among partners who have worked together for decades. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” Drees says. “Thus, two partners plus two partners doesn't equal four; it equals six for conservation success.” That is true of the partnerships as well as the land—bound together for all this time, the teamwork of many in an irreplaceable expanse of Ozarks is still outperforming what any single organization or island of forest could accomplish alone. TNC and MDC plan to continue to work together with their partners as those 5,600 acres of the former Chilton Creek Research and Demonstration Area move forward as part of Peck Ranch. More than 30 years after what began as a single land deal, those lessons are still multiplying. Photography Credits Front: Chilton Creek © Byron Jorjorian. Page 2: (from top) Prescribed burn at Chilton Creek Research and Demonstration Area © Route 3 Films; Pickerel frog © Rebecca Weaver. Page 3: (clockwise from left) Rose verbena © Rebecca Weaver; Tree canopy at Chilton Creek Research and Demonstration Area © Byron Jorjorian; Chilton Creek © Byron Jorjorian. Back: 2013 Survey of Chilton Creek Research and Demonstration Area © Lauren Merchant
The Nature Conservancy in Missouri P.O. Box 440400, St. Louis, MO 63144 nature.org/missouri
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