Displaying items by tag: wolf river conservancy

 Students from Hixson High School help the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute release juvenile lake sturgeon into the Tennessee River from Coolidge Park on Oct. 23, in Chattanooga. This year the Aquarium and its partners in the Lake Sturgeon Working Group are celebrating 25 years of stocking sturgeon in the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Tennessee Aquarium

Long-term restoration efforts lead comeback of species, missing since 1970s

CHATTANOOGA — The Tennessee Aquarium’s longest-running conservation program is celebrating major developments that have biologists and wildlife managers brimming with excitement.

Massive, ancient and long-lived, the lake sturgeon has been extirpated (locally extinct) in Tennessee since the 1970s. The effort to re-establish this state-imperiled species began in 1998 with the formation of the Southeast Lake Sturgeon Working Group, a collaborative partnership between non-profits like the Aquarium as well as universities and state and federal agencies.

Since the start of reintroductions in 2000, working group members have raised and released more than 430,000 lake sturgeon into the Tennessee and Cumberland river watersheds.

The cumulative effect of that work is already changing the lake sturgeon’s fortunes. This year, the species’ conservation status in Tennessee decreased from endangered to threatened, an adjustment that reflects the long-term impact of the restoration program, says Dr. Anna George, the Aquarium’s vice president of conservation science and education. 

A man paddles down the main stem of the Wolf River in West Tennessee. The state is working to purchase 5,477 acres of forest land near Grand Junction from the Hobart Ames Foundation. The land is part of the Wolf River watershed.  Wolf River Conservancy

The roughly 5,500-acre property features wetland forest used for research by the University of Tennessee

This article was originally published by Tennessee Lookout.

GRAND JUNCTION — About 60 miles east of Memphis near the Mississippi line, verdant hardwood trees and ecologically exceptional streams weave through thousands of acres of rolling hills.

The land is home to a diverse array of aquatic and terrestrial life, decades-old archaeological sites and a watershed that feeds into the aquifer where hundreds of thousands of Memphians source their drinking water.

If all goes to plan, 5,477 acres of this land will soon become Tennessee’s newest state forest, securing its preservation for posterity.

The land is a portion of the 18,400-acre historic Ames Plantation, a privately owned tract in Fayette and Hardeman Counties amassed by Massachusetts industrialist Hobart Ames in the early 1900s.