Nature Conservancy of Canada works on large-scale, permanent land conservation to protect the country’s most important natural areas.
The latest project involves a critical grassland area on a massive tract of land in the Interlake area of Manitoba.
The Lake Ranch project involves nearly 2,700 hectares and is home to a number of Canada's Species at Risk such as the Sprague’s pipit and bobolink which breed in the large expanses of grasslands. While the project wetlands attract migratory wetland birds like western grebes.
NCC's Cary Hamel, Manitoba director of conservation says grasslands are important to us as prairie people, as rangelands, for farming, as places to connect with nature.
He notes they sequester carbon, they slow down flooding, they provide habitat for pollinators and they're also really important in terms of biodiversity and endangered species as grasslands decline, and the habitat disappears.
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Hamel says the Lake Ranch is really special and incredibly diverse.
"It's on a lake shore, it has wetland, it has forest. One of the most special things about it, is it has over 500 hectares of tall grass prairie. That's the most endangered of the endangered grassland types. Tall grass prairie used to extend across the Red River Valley down to Texas. Now in Manitoba, at least less than 1% of it is left. So all of this in one large block, that's big enough to allow those natural ecosystem functions that prairies need, like grazing, and maybe fire and things like that to continue to really kind of sustain this place is an example of what once was."
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