Virginia group encourages landowners to support local biodiversity
Virginia’s tourism motto is “Virginia is for Lovers.” But research groups seeking to persuade landowners to restore their properties to support local flora and fauna are guided by a modified motto: “Virginia is for LAND Lovers.”
Here’s why: It’s estimated that over 80 percent of land in Virginia is privately held. That means that landowners can have a significant role in creating habitats that support the growth of native plants and local wildlife.
“That’s a huge, huge amount of land,” said Kadiera Ingram, landowner outreach associate for The Clifton Institute, a nonprofit located on the outskirts of Warrenton, Virginia. The institute uses its 900-acre field station in Virginia’s Hunt Country to conduct research projects on ecology, biodiversity, and the restoration of local habitats. Clifton also has an education arm that seeks to inspire a deeper understanding and appreciation of nature.
Ingram’s role involves visiting local landowners’ properties for free, working with those landowners on their conservation interests and land management goals, and devising plans or offering advice on how they can restore their landscapes more naturally.
“We’ve got our state and federal agencies doing what they can on public land with the limited resources they have. But here—especially here in Northern Virginia—where folks have the land, have the motivation, and have the money, it’s really important to get folks to start adopting best land management practices,” Ingram said.
One of the research projects that Clifton is currently studying is looking at the best practices to restore former cow pastures and farmland into grasslands, keeping in mind that the grasslands could be Virginia’s Piedmont region, an area of river valleys between the Coastal Plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains, according to the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.
Clifton began this project in 2019, focusing on 110 acres of an overgrazed cow pasture on the property. Clifton hopes to use its research findings to help inform local landowners about how they can restore their land to support native plants and wildlife.
“There are a lot of people out here who have very large properties, and there’s a good amount of open pasture and grassland. So, that’s really our specialty: looking at grasslands,” Ingram said.
The evolving science of landscape restoration
Researchers in the U.S. Midwest have been studying grassland restoration for some time, but the science is relatively new for Virginia and Mid-Atlantic states, in part because Virginia is known more for its forests.
