The ENRTF grant will introduce 12 young people to conservation careers through full-time, paid internships and apprenticeships on the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge (16 FTEs over 2 years).
This project will provide condition monitoring and problem investigation monitoring at the following sites. Mississippi River: Tributaries include Bassett Creek, Cannon River, Crow River, and Minnehaha Creek. Minnesota River: Tributaries include Eagle Creek, Riley Creek, and Willow Creek. St. Croix River: Tributary includes Valley Creek.
Expanding waste diversion practices across the state this project will: create 16 jobs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide data to measure the social, economic, and environmental benefits of waste diversion.
This Minnesota Forests for the Future project protected 1,947 acres of forest and forested wetlands with 1,478 acres of perpetual working forest conservation easements and 469 acres of fee title acquisition in Cass, Hubbard, Lake and Morrison Counties; ensuring public benefits, management access and sustainable managed forests.
Legacy funds allow the Minnesota Zoo to extend the season of the Wells Fargo Family Farm beyond its historical May to September season to include full programming and exhibits from April through November.
The Minnesota Forest Recovery Project completed habitat enhancement on 5519 unique acres of public lands in Lake, Cass, Itasca, St. Louis, Cook, and Beltrami Counties. Multiple treatments on some parcels ensured success of enhancement efforts.
The Minnesota Forests for the Future Program will use $4.573 million in the Northern and Southeast Forest sections to protect and enhance habitat. In the Northern Forest, we propose to protect 1,500 acres with permanent conservation easements and 400 acres in fee title acquisition, and to enhance 100 acres. In the Southeast Forest, we propose to add 100 acres to the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest and enhance 300 acres of existing state forest land.
The MN Forests for the Future Program will use $2,971,000 in the Northern, Southeast and Transition Forest sections to protect 1,966 acres of habitat with permanent working forest conservation easements. Phase 8 builds upon past land protection work and focuses on permanently protecting working forests threatened by conversion to non-forest uses. This program will also protect habitat in priority cold-water refuge watersheds by implementing protection strategies identified in local watershed plans.
Minnesota Trout Unlimited will enhance and restore degraded habitat for fish and wildlife in and along priority coldwater streams located on existing public lands and conservation easements. Trout streams are a relatively scarce resource. Increasing threats to them require accelerating habitat work to reduce the backlog of degraded stream reaches, improve riparian forests to improve stream flows and temperatures, and buffer streams from larger, more frequent rainfall and flood events. Outcomes will be maximized by improving the connectivity of habitat and fish and wildlife populations.
The Civics Education Coalition will create opportunities for students, enrich teacher capacity to engage students, and build state-wide networks. Work will include an interactive website, online youth summit, youth conference, new lessons for educators, teacher institutes, and expansion of the statewide Civic Education Network and its activities.
To costume and equip seven mannequin figures for a major exhibit commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and Minnesota's tragic Dakota War of 1862 in a new 528 square foot gallery.
The Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center (MITPPC) requests $7 million to fund up to 20 new, high-priority applied TIS research projects to improve Minnesota's natural and agricultural resources.
We will investigate the potential of natural microbes indigenous to Minnesota to biodegrade conventional plastics in the environment as a means for cleaning contaminated soils and waters across the state.
This project proposes to expand recreational opportunities on Minnesota State Trails through the rehabilitation and enhancement of existing state trails and replacement or repair of existing state trail bridges.
Mankato State University (MSU) will work with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) to plan a stakeholder process kick off meeting for the Minnesota River Ag/Urban partnership project. MSU will help to plan and facilitate the meeting.
Minnesota Trout Unlimited enhanced in-stream and riparian habitat for trout and other wildlife along more than 11 miles of coldwater streams across the state. We far exceeded our original targets, enhancing habitat on 135 acres rather than 78. We completed 16 separate stream habitat projects. Leveraging other funding and efficiently contracting projects allowed us to add habitat projects and adjust to changing conditions.
This project will create a high accuracy elevation dataset - critical for effectively planning and implementing water quality projects - for the state of Minnesota using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and geospatial mapping technologies. Although some areas of the state have been mapped previously, many counties remain unmapped or have insufficient or inadequate data. This multi-year project, to be completed in 2012, is a collaborative effort of Minnesota's Digital Elevation Committee and partners with county surveyors to ensure accuracy with ground-truthing.
The Minnesota County Biological Survey (MCBS) is an ongoing effort begun in 1987 by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) that is systematically surveying, county-by-county, the state's natural habitats. The effort identifies significant natural areas and collects and interprets data on the status, distribution, and ecology of plants, animals, and native plant communities throughout the state. Through 2009 surveys have been completed in 74 of Minnesota's 87 counties and have added nearly 17,000 new records of rare features to the DNR's information systems.
Minnesota Public Radio is the state's largest cultural organization, providing 96 percent of the population with free access to some of the best broadcast cultural programming in the world. Minnesota Public Radio is using a grant from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund to implement projects around the following four goals:
This funding is for arts, arts education, and arts access, and to preserve Minnesota's history and cultural heritage.
The Minnesota Children's Museum will develop a literacy focused exhibit to catalyze community engagement around early childhood learning and education.
The Minnesota Moose Collaborative (Collaborative) has implemented a variety of habitat enhancement treatments across the core of moose range in Northeast Minnesota on County, State, Federal, and Tribal lands since 2013. Moose browse has been improved through treatments that regenerate preferred brush and tree species. The Collaborative has also planted over two million trees including white spruce, white pine, jack pine, and white cedar.
Minnesota Trout Unlimited enhanced in-stream and riparian habitat for trout and other wildlife along coldwater streams located on public lands and Aquatic Management Area easements across the state. We completed 12 separate projects encompassing 118 acres and 9.3 miles of stream habitat. Leveraging other funding and efficiently contracting projects allowed us to increase the scope of some projects and adjust to changing conditions. We enhanced more acres of habitat and more stream length than originally proposed.
This Minnesota Forests for the Future project protected 19,439 acres of forest and forested wetlands with perpetual working forest conservation easements in Lake, Itasca and Koochiching Counties ensuring public access, management access and sustainably managed forests.
