Natural Areas Association (NAA) is an association of scientists and practitioners focused on the management of ecologically significant natural landscapes with the intent to protect biodiversity for current and future generations. Natural Areas News is your trusted resource for current events, reliable science, conservation success, emerging challenges, best practices, and achievements of those who work daily to preserve natural areas.

Photo courtesy of USFWS, Public Domain

Nine states have set goals to conserve 30 percent of their land by 2030. Maryland got there first. The protected land includes a one-acre fish hatchery at Unicorn Lake in eastern Maryland and the sprawling Green Ridge State Forest in the west. It includes shorelines, farms and woods around Naval Air Station Patuxent River, and the Chesapeake Forest Lands, some 75,000 wooded acres that are home to species like bald eagles and the once-endangered Delmarva fox squirrel.

The White House shared its intent to rescind the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Public Lands Rule, a clarifying policy that brought long-overdue balance between conservation and extractive use in public lands management. This announcement threatens public land access and use by all user groups and could roll back protections and restoration efforts for some of the most celebrated landscapes in the country, including more than 80 national parks that are directly adjacent to BLM-managed lands.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History have used data from a 120-year-old program managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to quantify the effects of introduced species. The researchers included more than 5 million measurements from individual trees across much of eastern North America.

Journal cover photo courtesy of Richard P. Reading, Ph.D.

NAA is proud to offer the Natural Areas Journal Invasive Species Compendium: An Offering to Aid in Your Work and a Call to Action as a resource to those who steward natural areas and face the ever-growing impacts of invasive species. This compendium highlights over 10 years of published work in the form of more than 79 different manuscripts and articles that are all open access

Photo courtesy of Bob Wick, BLM

On behalf of Natural Areas Association and partner organizations, we invite you to sign a letter urging sustained funding for the Bureau of Land Management’s Plant Conservation and Restoration Program.

This program has historically driven the federal government’s National Seed Strategy, and continued support is essential to ensure this important work can move forward.

The deadline is 5 p.m. MT on May 5, 2025.

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Funding Opportunities

Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund

Deadline: July 15, 2025

Vermont Biodiversity Protection Fund

Deadline: November 15, 2025

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