Diario del proyecto MassWildlife's Fox Den Wildlife Management Area

Archivos de diario de agosto 2019

08 de agosto de 2019

Welcome to MassWildlife's Fox Den WMA Project!

Welcome to the MassWildlife All Wildlife Biodiversity Project! You may know MassWildlife, the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, in our traditional role as the state hunting and fishing agency. Possibly you know the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program, the part of MassWildlife that tracks and regulates rare species listed under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act. But, in fact, MassWildlife works to conserve all biodiversity in the Commonwealth—plants, animals, fungi, every species.

We started this iNaturalist project for two reasons: to communicate with naturalists in Massachusetts; and to encourage people to get outside and enjoy learning more about the biodiversity in our great state.

Our first project in iNaturalist is to introduce you to fifteen of our Wildlife Management Areas and Wildlife Conservation Easements (WMAs and WCEs) all across the state. In total, MassWildlife manages over 220,000 acres of wildlife lands in Massachusetts for wildlife to thrive and for people to enjoy. We’ve chosen fifteen properties from the Berkshires to Cape Cod that offer a range of habitats and variety of wildlife viewing opportunities. This property, the Fox Den Wildlife Management Area, is located in Middlefield, Worthington, and Chester, and offers extensive wooded hills along the Middle Branch of the Westfield River. All fifteen properties are great places for naturalists to go exploring and find hundreds, even thousands, of common and uncommon species. While we already have a breadth of knowledge about these properties, we don’t know every species on them – and that’s where you can help!

If you’d like to help, please join MassWildlife’s All Wildlife Biodiversity Project , which will collect the data from all fifteen properties. You can also join this project or one of the others listed here and shown on this map:

Check back here often, as we will be writing about what we’re doing for habitat management on these WMAs, what we find when we survey these properties, or about any number of interesting species and habitats we find along the way. Feel free to ask questions— and please join us!

Publicado el agosto 8, 2019 05:26 TARDE por masswildlife masswildlife | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario

26 de agosto de 2019

More Land Protected!

Every year, MassWildlife acquires and protects more land as Wildlife Management Areas and Wildlife Conservation Easements (WMAs and WCEs) for wildlife to thrive and for people to enjoy. Our fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30, so we just wrapped up land projects for fiscal year 2019. In that year, we acquired 2,428 acres at a total cost of $6.2 million. Funding for land protection during fiscal year 2019 came from four sources: the $5 Wildlands Stamp added to hunting and fishing licenses sold in Massachusetts; the Massachusetts Open Space Bond; additional grant funding from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs; and In-Lieu Fee funding from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The addition of 611 acres to the Fox Den WMA, in the towns of Chester, Middlefield, and Worthington, increases the acreage of this large property by more than 10%! It was already one of our largest properties, at over 5,000 acres; the new acquisitions raise that to almost 5,650 acres.

We’ve edited the boundaries of this WMA in iNaturalist to reflect these new additions. Nobody at all, not even MassWildlife, has done any iNaturalizing in these 611 acres of new Wildlife Management Area. Let’s go see what we can find!

Publicado el agosto 26, 2019 06:26 TARDE por masswildlife masswildlife | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario

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