Alcoa Sows Seeds of Conservation
By BRYAN CORBIN, Courier & Press Statehouse bureau (317) 631-7405 or corbinb@courierpress.com
Planting new hardwood trees to restore forestland and link disconnected nature preserves in Southwestern Indiana will be funded through a donation announced Tuesday.
The Alcoa Foundation made a $300,000 grant to the Indiana Nature Conservancy to fund two projects: reforestation to reconnect several Southwestern Indiana nature preserves and analysis of several environmental studies of the Wabash River basin through western Indiana.
Approximately 150 to 200 acres of bottomland hardwood trees will be restored in nature preserves in Posey County and near the Warrick- Spencer county border, officials from the Indiana Nature Conservancy said.
John Shuey of the conservancy identified the areas as Bloomfield Barrens and the Twin Swamps in Point Township.
“We’d like to create a bigger swath of forest through there,” Shuey said. “It’ll be seeded with bottomland hardwoods, mostly taking some of that flood-prone land out of production and rebuilding a larger forest bloc to reconnect some of the fragments.”
Areas to be replanted with the Alcoa Foundation money are either owned by the conservancy or the property owners have given their permission.
“It’s all highly fragmented because of the rural cropland that bisects it. What we’d like to do is connect the dots, if you will,” Shuey said. “Instead of having 600 acres of forest and then a mile away another 600 acres, have some connectivity to it, so that wildlife can move. It would just make for a more viable system in the long term.”
The Alcoa Foundation is the charitable arm of Alcoa, the world’s leading producer of aluminum products. Sally Rideout Lambert, spokeswoman for Alcoa, said a third of the $300,000 grant would go to Southwestern Indiana reforestation, with the remainder used to do an assessment and conservancy plan of the Wabash River.
“Over the years, there have been dozens of studies about the stresses on the river and about the species that call it home,” said Mary McConnell, state director of the Nature Conservancy.
“But many of these studies were never done in a coordinated fashion, and there are lots of gaps in the data.”
The two-year grant from the Alcoa Foundation will allow the Nature Conservancy to assemble the existing studies into a “more holistic look” at the river system, McConnell said.
The grant was announced at a Statehouse ceremony Tuesday with officials of the Nature Conservancy, Alcoa and Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman.
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