Longleaf Advocate Recognized
Submitted by John Ann Shearer
Lark Hayes, senior and founding attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, received the 2010 North Carolina Chapter of The Wildlife Society Wildlife Conservation Award for her outstanding efforts dedicated to the restoration of the longleaf pine ecosystem in North Carolina and the Southeast.
As an advocate for the restoration and enhancement of the longleaf pine ecosystem, Lark dedicated an immense amount of time, effort, and knowledge to the launching of America’s Longleaf, a range-wide initiative to restore this imperiled ecosystem. America’s Longleaf seeks to maintain healthy longleaf forests, improve forests in poor condition, and restore forests where they’ve been lost.
To reach these goals, Lark served as America’s Longleaf Coordinator, helping to coordinate a diverse array of nonprofit groups and government agencies that have a major stake in longleaf conservation?ranging from turkey hunters to the U.S. Department of Defense, which holds large stands of longleaf on southern military posts.
After convening over 20 partnering organizations and gathering input from over 100 resource professionals representing the southeast’s longleaf expertise, Lark led the America’s Longleaf steering committee on the path to developing a range-wide conservation plan for Longleaf Pine. This effort was accomplished and rolled out in March 2009 at the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference in Washington DC.
As the coordinator for this effort Lark organized the many participants and ensured communication among those participants. One way she accomplished that was overseeing the creation of a web site (Americanslongleaf.org) where professionals could provide input on the Conservation Plan and stay abreast of activities related to the initiative. It now serves to educate the public and professionals about the values of longleaf pine. She compiled and edited the Conservation Plan using input from the many participants and ultimately produced a polished document (see: http://www.americaslongleaf.org/resources/the-conservation-plan).
In North Carolina Lark is working with an array of interested natural resource professionals to step down the regional plan to North Carolina so that on-the-ground accomplishments can be made.