![\"Austin](\"http:\/\/www.clarksvilleonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Austin-Peay-State-University-leads-national-conservation-effort-with-Southeastern-Grasslands-Initiative-480x320.jpg\" "\\"Austin")
<\/a>Austin Peay State University Professor of Biology, Dr. Dwayne Estes, leads a tour through Baker Prairie Natural Area.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Paulsons, Hank and Wendy, they\u2019re major conservationists, so sitting at the table with them was pretty great,\u201d Estes said.<\/p>\n
For the past year, the APSU professor has been traveling the country to drum up support for these endangered eco-systems, delivering 84 presentations to more than 3,000 people. On May 18th, the Tennessee Wildlife Federation recognized his efforts by awarding him with its coveted \u201cConservationist of the Year\u201d award.<\/p>\n
\u201cGrassland conservation is becoming a movement whose time has come,\u201d Estes said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a topic he\u2019s been passionate about throughout his career, and last year, Estes realized Austin Peay was prepared to lead this national conservation effort. In January, Estes and Theo Witsell, a botanist and ecologist with the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, launched the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative (SGI).<\/p>\n
Housed within Austin Peay\u2019s Center of Excellence for Field Biology and the APSU Department of Biology, the burgeoning organization is forming an impressive array of collaborators and partnerships, including the University of Texas\u2019s Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the University of North Carolina\u2019s North Carolina Botanical Garden, the Society for Range Management, and Roundstone Native Seed LLC.<\/p>\n
Thanks to grants from philanthropic foundations such as the BAND Foundation, a private family foundation that focuses on nature conservation, and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, SGI is now ready to begin protecting and restoring endangered grasslands.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy reaching our funding goal through these grants, which for our first year was approximately $575,000, we\u2019ve hired four staff members and are set to hire our first coordinator position this summer,\u201d Estes said. \u201cThis person will be based here at APSU, to work across central Tennessee and Kentucky to restore 7,000 acres of grasslands, in collaboration with 10 other partner organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n
SGI was designed to serve a 23-state region across the southern United States, spanning from New York City to Columbia, Missouri, south to the Miami, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas, with the goal of hiring regional coordinators to serve in different key areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese regional coordinators will be based at our partner institutions, such as the Atlanta Botanical Garden,\u201d Estes said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat our coordinators will do is help plan the restorations, develop and lead an army of grassland volunteers, and work hand-in-hand with land owners and agencies to help put these prairies back in place,\u201d Estes said. \u201cWe\u2019ll be targeting private land owners for the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service grant-funded project, and the idea is they\u2019ll be able to apply for federal funds through this grant we received, along with 10 other partners, and we\u2019ll help guide the restoration of these projects, ensuring consistency across state and eco-region boundaries and that restorations are science-based.\u201d<\/p>\n
[320left]The SGI received a major boost earlier this year when, thanks to the BAND Foundation grant, it was able to hire two renowned experts\u2014Witsell, SGI\u2019s co-founder, and Dr. Reed Noss, one of the world\u2019s top conservation biologists.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are the best of the best,\u201d Estes said.<\/p>\n
Noss, SGI\u2019s chief science advisor, recently retired as the Provost\u2019s Distinguished Research Professor from the University of Central Florida, and he\u2019s published several seminal books on the subject, including \u201cSaving Nature\u2019s Legacy: Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity\u201d and \u201cForgotten Grasslands of the South: Natural History and Conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cReed is considered one of the top 500 published authors of all time in all genres, and his addition to our team is invaluable,\u201d Estes said. \u201cIt feels great to know that we have some of the best of the best on our team. It also means a lot to me personally that my APSU family has embraced and supported SGI. There are so many on campus, starting with the University\u2019s administrators, all the way down to my own graduate students, who have gotten behind this. They all deserve thanks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis initiative is an attempt to restore bits and pieces of this ecosystem that we\u2019ve lost over the last 200 years,\u201d Estes said. \u201cWhile grasslands as a whole in the Southeast have declined by 90 percent, down from nearly 100 million acres two centuries ago, many types such as the prairies around Clarksville are 99 percent gone. The explorers who described these prairies in the 1790s, they described buffalo and prairie chickens\u2014things we don\u2019t have any more. You have to remember, it was originally grassland for thousands and thousands of years before we got here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Information on SGI, including a video and information on how to become a member, is available online at www.segrasslands.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austin Peay State University Clarksville, TN – Earlier this year, Dr. Dwayne Estes, Austin Peay State University professor of botany, was eating lunch with Henry Paulson, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush, and his wife, Wendy Paulson, when the conversation suddenly turned to prairies. Between bites, Estes explained that for thousands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,262,825,9054,5962,32059,4117,32061,1758,32060,15444],"class_list":["post-25854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","tag-apsu","tag-austin-peay-state-university","tag-clarksville-tn","tag-dwayne-estes","tag-george-w-bush","tag-henry-paulson","tag-kentucky","tag-southeastern-grasslands-initiative","tag-tennessee","tag-tennessee-wildlife-federation","tag-u-s-president"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xGYI-6J0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25855,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25854\/revisions\/25855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Austin](\"http:\/\/www.clarksvilleonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Austin-Peay-State-University-APSU.jpg\" "\\"Austin")
Clarksville, TN<\/strong> – Earlier this year, Dr. Dwayne Estes, Austin Peay State University professor of botany, was eating lunch with Henry Paulson, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush, and his wife, Wendy Paulson, when the conversation suddenly turned to prairies.<\/p>\n![\"Austin](\"http:\/\/www.clarksvilleonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Austin-Peay-State-University-leads-national-conservation-effort-with-Southeastern-Grasslands-Initiative.jpg\" "\\"Austin")
<\/a>