The next WIGICC meeting will be held from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm on Thursday, August 19, 2010. The meeting will be held in Room 205 of the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street, Madison.
This meeting will feature a discussion with the Gathering Waters Conservancy. Gathering Waters has recently partnered with the Lake Michigan Shorelands Alliance and the Trust for Public Land to use GIS technology to map conservation opportunities in parts of the Lake Michigan basin (www.gatheringwaters.org). According to Kate Zurlo-Cuva, Land Trust Program Director at Gathering Waters,
“Gathering Waters Conservancy (GWC) was established in 1994 to help people protect the places that make Wisconsin special. In 16 years GWC has worked to position land trusts to accomplish lasting conservation on Wisconsin’s landscape. Some accomplishments as a result of these efforts are: Land trusts are working in almost every community in Wisconsin, public financial support available for private land conservation has reached $12 million per year with the reauthorization of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund, and we successfully rallied to create a statewide Purchase of Development Rights funding program to permanently protect our working farms and forest lands in Wisconsin. With these accomplishments under our belt, we continue to advocate and nurture strong land trusts in Wisconsin. We are currently exploring ways to ensure that land trusts have the tools they need to speed the pace of voluntary, permanent land protection. We are hoping that through our relationships with organizations such as WIGGIC, we can help make the connections to resources land trusts need to do the work of setting conservation priorities and recording/filing transactions in perpetuity.”
A full agenda for the meeting will be made available next week.
WIGICC Council meetings are open to the public. Please plan to attend!
The meeting agenda is here.