The Nature Conservancy. Protecting nature. Preserving life.™

Louisiana Black Bear © Arkansas Parks and Tourism

Percolating out from the Mississippi River, the Lower Mississippi River Valley comprises thousands of acres of floodplain forests that were once home to the famed Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Florida Panther and Red Wolf.

Once the largest contiguous tract of floodplain forest in North America, only 26 percent of the Lower Mississippi River Valley’s historic extent remains, much of it as isolated fragments.

A small tract of land in the heart of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, made famous from Ivory-billed studies in the 1930s, is a key to connecting existing forest fragments.

Helping The Climate and Wildlife

This tract located in Louisiana’s Tensas (pronounced Tensaw) River Basin, is the first project in The Nature Conservancy's voluntary carbon offset program. The tract, which formerly stood as unproductive farmland, was acquired and planted with a variety of native tree species by The Nature Conservancy. The land was then sold to a private individual; as part of the sale a permanent conservation easement was placed on the land and all carbon rights were reserved by The Nature Conservancy. The project design is currently undergoing validation by an independent third-party to the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS).

Revenue from voluntary carbon offset contributions is supporting the investment necessary to buy the land for the project, to plant trees, to monitor the carbon benefits and to manage the project.

The Tensas River Basin Project is part of a system of 3,600 acres that are or will soon be under conservation management, creating a large contiguous block of forest within the Lower Mississippi Valley that will restore critical habitat.

“The Tensas River Basin Project fills a gap and consolidates this larger conservation area. It represents a critical piece in the conservation puzzle,” said Ronnie Ulmer, the Northeast Louisiana Program Director for The Nature Conservancy.

According to Conservancy climate change experts, the trees planted on 406.3 acres of the tract are predicted to capture and store 122,925 short tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the first 70 years. This is a gross estimate, which does not take into account leakage and impermanence deductions described below.

To comply with the VCS, to take into account the possibility of carbon losses due to natural hazards or human-caused events beyond our control (“impermanence”), to reflect the possibility of our project resulting in emissions elsewhere due to shifting of agricultural production (“leakage”) and to maintain conservativeness in our carbon estimates, we are reserving 65,150 short tons of CO2 from the project, until the process of third-party project design validation is complete, leaving a conservative estimate of 57,775 short tons of CO2 available for the voluntary offset program. The project validation process is underway now, and is expected to be complete in mid-2011, at which point, the carbon benefits held in reserve will be adjusted to reflect the outcome of project validation.

It is important to remember that this is the first project in the voluntary carbon offset program. As demand increases for the program we will be expanding to include new projects.

Connecting Louisiana Wilderness

The Tensas River Basin Project is a historic opportunity to reforest private land in Tensas River Basin, Louisiana, where an estimated 74 percent of bottomland hardwood forests have been cleared and converted for agriculture.

By reforesting these private lands, the Conservancy will protect land and restore critical habitat that will store forest carbon. This region is a priority for conservation because:

• Deforestation has left islands of remnant forests surrounded by a sea of agriculture – reforestation will serve to connect small existing forest tracts to create critical wildlife corridors;
• It supports the largest-known population of the Louisiana Black Bear;
• It contains several priority bird conservation areas; and
• It hosts rare and endangered fish, mussels and aquatic ecosystems that are affected by adjacent agricultural lands.

The Tensas River Basin Project will be a part of a system of nearly 3,600 acres that is or soon will be under conservation management – land that is connected to the 85,000 acre Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge and Big Lake Wildlife Management Area via a corridor of riparian forest along the Tensas River.

The hope is that this corridor will allow for movement of native species such as black bear, and that future widening of the corridor will improve biodiversity.