The Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture (AMJV) partnership is focused on preserving, managing, and restoring diverse, healthy forest habitats in the region to benefit not only birds, but the diversity of Appalachian plants and wildlife.
Our Focal Landscape Initiative strategically targets our capacity and resources to high-priority regions established by our partners within the AMJV geography. This approach maximizes our conservation impacts and make concrete steps towards improving habitat for our priority species. We are developing this initiative in parallel with American Bird Conservancy’s BirdScapes. Our objective with this initiative is to achieve landscape-level benefits for our priority birds, demonstrated by stabilizing or increasing populations within the focal landscapes.
Click here to learn more about each of the current Focal Landscapes.
Why (the need)
The geology of the Appalachian Mountains and size of intact forests provide unique environments that make the region a biological hotspot and an outdoor recreational oasis. But the diversity of forest structure and age classes in Appalachian forests has greatly diminished over the last century. After mass deforestation occurred in the late 19th and early 20th century across the Appalachians, the forests that returned have been impacted by other pressures, such as continued poor forest management, an influx of invasive plants and insects, and suppression of natural disturbances such a fire. As a result, today’s Appalachians forests face a variety of challenges that reduce their health, resiliency, and ability to provide quality habitat for a variety of plants and wildlife.
Goals
The Process
This is a “bottom-up” effort, with AMJV partners leading the development of individual focal landscapes across the AMJV geography and AMJV staff supporting and advising these efforts as needed. We are treating each landscape as a holistic system and leaning heavily on partners to identify the overarching objectives for each landscape, including priorities that are not bird-centric. Each focal landscape is developed based on the following criteria:
Long-term Vision for Healthy Forests, Increasing Bird Populations
Effectively restoring, managing, and protecting our Appalachian forests is not a short-term exercise, but will require long-term planning and corresponding actions on the ground. For each focal landscape identified, AMJV partners will set specific long-term (e.g., ten-year) conservation goals that address active habitat management, protection and restoration activities, reduction of key threats, and influencing practices on working and commercial lands. Such activities – along with focused outreach strategies to target key stakeholders – will enhance the health and resilience of forests and wildlife to future changes.
Focal Landscape Fact Sheets
The 2022 State of the Birds Report is now available! The report shows long-term downward trends for our nation’s birds that reveal a vital message: Birds are declining in every…
Read MoreOur AMJV team is excited to share with you that our brand new AMJV Outreach Toolkit - designed to help folks communicate about forest management topics - is now available…
Read MoreDeep in AMJV’s Virginia Highlands Focal Landscape you can find Boiling Springs Rod and Gun Club, a private hunting club with over 4,000 acres. They are a non-profit organization with 20…
Read MoreAppalachian Mountains Joint Venture
1700 Kraft Drive, Suite 1375
Blacksburg, VA 24060
Office: (540) 951-9376
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