Volgenau Virginia Coast Reserve

Our Staff

Meet the people working on creative solutions here on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Media inquiries: To schedule an interview with a member of our VVCR staff, please contact Ann Nallo, Director of Communications in Virginia, at ann.nallo@tnc.org.

Other inquiries: For island‑use policies, connecting with our community outreach or education programs, or conducting research on the islands, please contact Margaret Van Clief, Community Engagement Specialist, at margaret.vanclief@tnc.org or (757) 414-9227.

Volunteer with Us! 

Support the VVCR team with your helpful spirit and generosity of time! We offer a variety of volunteer opportunities across the state, including on the Eastern Shore.  

• Brownsville Preserve Steward: Stewardship workdays are typically held 1-2 times a month to complete projects such as trail maintenance, cutting and hauling limbs, building or repairing boardwalks and cutting brush and overgrown vegetation. 
• Bluebird Box Monitoring: This is a great opportunity for birders! Volunteers are needed to check bluebird boxes, fill out data sheets and take photos as part of our bluebird monitoring at Brownsville Preserve. Volunteers will work as a team (monitoring individually) to ensure the bluebird boxes are monitored once a week (preferably the same day each week), starting the first week of April and running through August. It typically takes 2 hours each visit.

Please contact the Virginia Volunteer Program by emailing  vavolunteers@tnc.org  to receive further information.

More than 50 Years of History

The Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR) has a rich history rooted in both ecological preservation and cultural heritage. In the 1970s, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) began acquiring Virginia’s barrier islands to protect them from development pressures. Over time the reserve grew into the largest stretch of coastal wilderness along the Atlantic seaboard. Today, VCR safeguards more than 130,000 acres of barrier islands, marshes, forests, and coastal bays, ensuring that migratory birds, marine life, and coastal communities benefit from its protection.

At the heart of the reserve lies Brownsville Preserve, once a working farm dating back to the 1600s and now the headquarters of TNC’s program. Its historic manor house and grounds reflect centuries of human history, from agriculture to the legacy of enslavement, while serving today as a hub for education, research, and community engagement. Over five decades, TNC has pioneered restoration projects such as oyster reef and seagrass recovery, making it a global model for nature-based solutions to climate resilience. We continue to honor the past while shaping a sustainable future for Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Our Key Partners

We work closely with Federal, state and local partners to achieve our conservation goals.

• Smithsonian Marine GEO
• University of Virginia Long Term Ecological Research (LTER)
• College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS)
• Virginia Marine Resources Commission
• US Fish and Wildlife Service
• Virginia Departments of Environmental Quality, Wildlife Resources and Conservation and Recreation
• Local government and private landowners

In addition to domestic partners, our work has global reach as well. The VCR is a member of the UNESCO Biosphere Program, dedicated to establishing a scientific basis for enhancing the relationship between people and their environments.

VCR is one of 701 sites of excellence in the World Network of Biosphere Reserves spanning 124 countries and including 21 transboundary sites. The network promotes collaboration and represents a unique tool for international cooperation through sharing knowledge, exchanging experiences, building capacity and promoting best practices.

Coastal Resilience

Virginia's Eastern Shore lies within one of the U.S’s most vulnerable coastal regions. Sea levels are rising at three to four times the global average and storms are intensifying. But natural solutions can provide a first line of defense.

The Nature Conservancy is working with leading coastal scientists and community partners to explore and document the resilience inherent in the Eastern Shore's natural systems. We are using this living laboratory to better understand how nature can make coastal communities here—and everywhere—more resilient in the face of a changing climate. 

• Accomack-Northampton Planning District Commission
• University of Virginia’s Long-Term Ecological Research Project 
• Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s Center for Coastal Resource Management
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Randolph-Macon College
• Duke University
• University of North Carolina-Wilmington
• Natural Capital Project
• The Brosnan Center for Risk Reduction
• NASA-Wallops Flight Facility
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge
• ARCADIS US, Inc.
• Warren-Pinnacle Consulting, Inc.

Education

VVCR’s education program aims to connect public school students in Accomack and Northampton Counties to the natural world through experiential field trips. The curriculum-based trips have been designed for 5th, 7th, and 10th grade students. The field experiences were collaboratively designed with local educators through participatory workshops to ensure they are aligned with Virginia’s Standards of Learning (S.O.L.’s.)  

• Northampton County Public Schools
• Accomack County Public Schools
• NOAA B-WET
• Volgenau Foundation

Land Protection

Through the Virginia Eastern Shore Conservation Alliance, we work with local, state, and federal partners, as well as private organizations, to conserve land in Accomack and Northampton counties. 

Over the years TNC has assisted Virginia’s departments of Conservation and Recreation, Game and Inland Fisheries, and the Coastal Zone Management Program, to identify and conserve natural areas for wildlife and public access. 

We have partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to add property to the Eastern Shore of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge, and helped develop the Cape Charles Bike and Hike Trail. 

One private partner, Virginia’s Eastern Shore Land Trust (VESLT), was established in 2003 to protect local farms, forests and wetlands. VESLT holds 76 conservation easements on 14,000 acres of land, including 1,037 acres that are co-held by The Nature Conservancy. TNC and VESLT also partner in outreach and education efforts, including an annual 2nd grade field trip to VCR's Brownsville Preserve.

Marine Habitat Restoration

VCR works alongside the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) in oyster reef restoration. Each year, we expand this work by building additional reefs in the coastal waters on both sides of the Eastern Shore. We also monitor these reefs to understand how they develop into functional habitat over time and to improve how we design and construct future reefs.

A decades-long partnership with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) has resulted in the largest and most successful seagrass restoration project  in the world. We’re working together to build on this success by returning bay scallops to Virginia waters. In 2017, we released 12.3 million bay scallop larvae that were spawned by VIMS and Cherrystone Aquafarms into the eelgrass in South Bay. The hope is to eventually restore a self-sustaining population of bay scallops.

Migratory Bird Conservation

We work closely with many different partners to understand how bird populations use and depend on the Volgenau Virginia Coast Reserve for survival. We use migratory bird conservation information to understand range-wide conservation needs and guide local management actions to protect and build resilient migratory bird populations both in coastal Virginia and throughout the hemisphere.    

• Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary
• Virginia Tech Shorebirds Program
• US Fish & Wildlife Service
• Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources
• Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation
• Virginia Marine Resources Commission
• Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program
• NASA/Wallops Flight Facility 
• Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory
• National Park Service
• USDA Virginia Wildlife Service

Long Term Ecological Research (LTER)

The largest and longest-lived ecological network in the United States, LTER brings together a multi-disciplinary group of scientists to study, document and analyze environmental change at sites across the country. The LTER program at the Virginia Coast Reserve began in 1987, and is administered through the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. Research projects include studying how climate change, sea-level rise and more—and more intense—coastal storms affect both human and natural communities on the Eastern Shore.

US Navy

We have worked with the US Navy since 2016 as part of their project to assess the winter population status of harbor and gray seals in the area. A group of approximately 50-80 seals routinely use TNC property at the Volgenau Virginia Coast Reserve to haul out. We also assist the Navy in deploying satellite tracking tags, successfully tagging 7 seals in 2018. We have learned a great deal about how the seals are using the area and the weather conditions that impact their behavior.