Dear Loyal Conservancy Supporters,

You have helped to make a tremendous lasting legacy in the Appalachians for future generations and our planet. Thank you!

Through your support of the Adopt an Acre program, The Nature Conservancy, in partnership with like-minded organizations, is working to protect and preserve 1.7 million acres of public and private land.

Using strategies such as land acquisition and creative forest restoration projects, we are making significant and lasting progress towards our goals. Your support has made the development and commitment to conservation easements and sustainable forestry practices possible, has sustained a program focus on combating invasive species and has fostered increased public awareness of the biodiversity and value of this vital landscape.

This Vital Landscape

The Appalachians are the oldest mountains in North America. They extend more than 1000 miles from cold, rocky summits amid the northern spruce and fir forests of Maine and Quebec to the Southern Cumberlands in Tennessee and Alabama. Within the larger Appalachian chain are the Green and White Mountains of northern New England, the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Adirondacks and Catskills in New York, the New York/New Jersey Highlands, the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania, the Smokies, Blue Ridge and Cumberlands of the South. Each of these smaller ranges has its own natural history, culture, and character.

The Appalachians are habitat to an immense diversity of plants and animals. Precious Heritage, the inventory of U.S. biological diversity completed by the Nature Conservancy in 2000 identified the Southern and Central Appalachians as one of six "biodiversity hotspots" in the country. Precious Heritage also identified the rivers and streams rising in the Southern and Central Appalachians as the most biologically diverse freshwater systems in North America and of global importance for mussels, snails and crayfish. In addition, the Southern and Central Appalachians include areas of karst geology with a whole suite of rare, endemic and threatened cave species.

The forests of the Appalachians also serve as a critical migratory corridor and breeding ground for a host of songbirds which overwinter in South and Central America. The Appalachians are thus a critical component of the larger global forests which ultimately sustain these beautiful migrants.

Your Support Makes a Difference

Thanks to your support of Adopt an Acre in the Appalachians, the Conservancy is working to:

• Secure appropriate management of 900,000 acres of portfolio sites in two national forests of the Central Appalachians and 100,000 in the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains.
• Effectively conserve two cave and karst areas in the Central Appalachians.
• Incorporate wide ranging species connectivity into state transportation planning.
• Protect functional forest and freshwater sites in the Northern Cumberlands conservation corridor and Paint Rock River headwaters.

Thank you again for supporting the Adopt an Acre program in the Appalachians. Thanks to dedicated supporters like you, we are restoring this vast and vital landscape.

Thank you for everything you do to protect nature and preserve life, each and every day.

Sincerely,

John Cook
Regional Director
Eastern US Conservation Region

p.s. Learn more about our expanding work in the Appalachians! Post this "I support the Appalachians" widget on your blog, social network or other web page.

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Appalachians in West Virginia. Photo © Kent Mason