Protecting the Clean Water of the Tippecanoe River

Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program Easement Helps Landowners

WINAMAC, INDIANA — Protecting Tippecanoe River floodplain areas is critical to protecting and maintaining water quality and to reducing flood catastrophes. A program in the Tippecanoe River watershed offers landowners a way to protect their land along the river. Recently, the program enabled over 150 acres of land in Pulaski County to be placed under permanent protection. This was done through the use of a conservation easement aimed at protecting the forested and wetland nature of the floodplain area.

A conservation easement is a voluntary agreement that regulates management activities on land. It is an important conservation tool used by many land trusts throughout the country. Now it is helping to protect the Tippecanoe River. Land management activities on properties under an easement are regulated to protect the conservation values of the property (i.e. forests and wetlands) in perpetuity. While conservation easements do not grant the public access to these properties, they do provide the landowner a means of protecting land and ensuring it is managed for conservation into the future.

“Conservation easements are a great way of ensuring continuation of a landowner’s conservation management activities and also a great way to pass on a landowner’s conservation legacy for the future” says Chad Watts, Project Manager for The Nature Conservancy’s Wabash Rivers Initiative - Tippecanoe River Project. “Easements create a situation where landowners can continue to protect the Tippecanoe River long after they have sold the land or passed it on to family members.”

A program in the Tippecanoe River, called the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) allows landowners who own forested floodplain acreage within the Tippecanoe River to enroll their land into a conservation easement. This program, which is a partnership between The Nature Conservancy and the State Departments of Agriculture and Natural Resources, is aimed at protecting the forested and wetland nature of floodplain land in the Tippecanoe River, and ensuring that this land can continue to provide benefits to water quality.

This program is currently looking for applicants who desire to protect their floodplain areas and want to participate in the program. Opportunities for enrollment are available to landowners whose land lies within the floodplain of the Tippecanoe River in Pulaski, Fulton, Marshall, Kosciusko and Starke Counties. Landowners who participate in the program are receiving a one-time payment of $500 per acre for eligible land placed under easement in the Tippecanoe River floodplain.

“Protecting floodplain areas is a key part of protecting and maintaining water quality and habitat for important species in the River,” says Watts. “Protecting the floodplain area will also help deal with floods in the future, as these floodplain areas provide a natural area where floodwaters can spread out and slow down, and it allows the river to store these floodwaters, rather than quickly ushering them downstream.”

To involve your land in a floodplain easement, or to find out more information about floodplain easements, landowners are encouraged to contact Chad Watts at The Nature Conservancy’s Wabash Rivers Initiative office in Winamac at (574) 946-7491 or cwatts@tnc.org, or contact the local Soil and Water Conservation District office in their respective county.

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. The Conservancy and its more than 1 million members have protected nearly 120 million acres worldwide. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.