Long Island Sound Futures Fund Grants 2023

In December, federal and state environmental agencies and officials from New England and New York, including the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), announced 39 grants totaling $12 million to organizations and local governments to improve the health of Long Island Sound.

The grants are matched by $8 million from the grantees themselves, resulting in $20 million in total conservation impact for projects in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont.

An array of Long Island Sound Futures Fund (Futures Fund) 2023 grants will support projects that improve water quality by preventing 2.7 million gallons of stormwater and 101,000 pounds of nitrogen pollution from flowing into Long Island Sound waters.

The projects will also remove 120 tons of marine debris from the sound and support planning for restoration of 880 acres of coastal habitat and 102 miles of river corridor vital to fish and wildlife.

The projects are designed to reach 30,000 people through environmental education programs that increase awareness of how to improve the health and vitality of the Sound.

Funding for the grant program comes from the EPA as part of the Long Island Sound Study (LISS), with additional support from FWS, NFWF, and The Zoetis Foundation.

The LISS initiated the Futures Fund in 2005 through EPA’s Long Island Sound Office and NFWF. Since its inception, the Futures Fund has invested $56 million in 640 projects.

The program has generated an additional $65 million in grantee matching funds towards these projects for a total conservation impact of $121 million.

Futures Fund projects have opened 121 river miles for fish passage, restored 842 acres of fish and wildlife habitat, treated 208 million gallons of stormwater pollution, and engaged 5 million people in protection and restoration of the sound.

A complete list of the 2023 Long Island Sound Futures Fund grants recipients is available on the NFWF Long Island Sound Futures Fund website.

Long Island Sound provides economic and recreational benefits to millions of people while also providing habitat for countless numbers of invertebrates, fish, and migratory birds.

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New England Facts

2022 Southeast Land Trust Wild & Scenic Film Festival

2022 Southeast Land Trust Wild & Scenic Film Festival
Friday April 22nd, 2022 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM
The Music Hall
28 Chestnut St, Portsmouth, NH 

On Friday April 22nd, 2022, the public is invited to join the Southeast Land Trust (SELT) in person and online for the 12th annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival.  

This year’s films combine exceptional filmmaking, beautiful cinematography, and first-rate storytelling to inform, inspire and ignite solutions and possibilities to restore the earth and human communities while creating a positive future for the next generation.

Attendees can expect award-winning films about nature, community activism, adventure, conservation, water, energy and climate change, wildlife, environmental justice, agriculture, and more. 

A volunteer film committee has hand-picked a program from the award-winning films curated by the South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL) and national Wild & Scenic Film Festival.

Tickets are $20 For more information, visit https://seltnh.org/wildandscenic/

To watch the program remotely participants must create an account with Qudio. If opting to buy virtual tickets viewers will be prompted to create an account during the purchase process.

If tickets are purchased through The Music Hall, ticketholders will receive an email with directions to register for the online event to watch virtually or in person.  

All ticket holders to SELT’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival will be able to watch the program on Demand from 10:56PM on Friday, April 22 through 11:56 PM Wednesday, April 27 through a registered Qudio Account. 

The Wild & Scenic Film Festival was started in 2003 by the South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL, pronounced ‘circle’), a watershed advocacy group based in the Sierra foothills of Northern California. 

The festival’s namesake is in celebration of achieving Wild & Scenic status on 39 miles of the South Yuba River in 1999. The festival celebrates its annual event in Nevada City, CA each winter featuring over 150 award-winning films and welcoming filmmakers, celebrities, and activists who bring a human face to the environmental movement.

SYRCL’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival is a call to action. The films illustrate not only the challenges facing our planet but the work communities are doing to protect the environment and the places we love. The stories give us a sense of place and what it means to be responsible stewards of the earth.

The Southeast Land Trust (SELT) conserves and stewards land for the benefit of people and nature in New Hampshire. SELT serves 52 towns and cities of Rockingham and Strafford counties and has conserved tens of thousands of acres, including nature preserves, hiking trails, farmland, and scenic vistas. Learn more at seltnh.org.

source: Southeast Land Trust

New Hampshire Rabbit Reports

Eastern Cottontail

NH Rabbit Reports (nhrabbitreports.org) is asking for citizen scientists to collect data, take photos, and report sightings of rabbits throughout New Hampshire this winter.

Anyone can participate, and rabbit sightings will help the NH Rabbit Reports team learn more about where rabbit species are located in the state.

Participants can use a smartphone or computer to submit a sighting information and photograph to NH Rabbit Reports, and no species identification skills are required.

New Hampshire is home to two species of rabbits, the Eastern cottontail and the New England cottontail, as well as one species of hare, the snowshoe hare.

NH Rabbit Reports sighting information helps researchers understand the distribution and potential abundance of these species. By understanding the relationship between the distributions of the two rabbit species, organizations and state agencies can make informed decisions about habitat management.

This is vital for rabbit species, particularly for the New England cottontail, which is classified as a state-endangered species in New Hampshire.

The New England cottontail is native to New Hampshire, but has seen dwindling population numbers over the last several decades throughout its range, mostly due to habitat loss and fragmentation. The species requires large areas of early-successional habitat to avoid predators, and they typically don’t venture far from thick shrubs and young trees.

Meanwhile, eastern cottontails are able to venture farther from protective cover and are better equipped to survive in the human-dominated habitats of New England.

N.H. Fish and Game coordinates a comprehensive effort to survey for the presence of New England cottontail rabbits in and around the areas where they are known to be present. However, less is known about where and in what numbers eastern cottontails are found in the state.

“We have received hundreds of sightings from people in New Hampshire reporting the rabbits they see,” said Heidi Holman, a wildlife biologist who coordinates N.H. Fish and Game’s New England cottontail restoration efforts. “The Rabbit Reports website gives us the opportunity to build a map and database of all this information to collect distribution information about eastern cottontail rabbits in one place.”

NH Rabbit Reports is sponsored by UNH Cooperative Extension and the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, with support from the Wildlife Heritage Foundation of New Hampshire.

For more information, visit the project website at nhrabbitreports.org

source: New Hampshire Fish and Game Department

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Wildlife in New England