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
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