Go Zero's Red River Restoration Initiative

Donations to the Fund's Go Zero program resulted in 350,000 trees planted at Red River National Wildlife Refuge, restoring more than 1,100 acres of forestland.

With its roots high in the Texas Panhandle, two forks of the Red River confluence at the Texas-Oklahoma border to flow 1,360 miles (2,190 km) into Louisiana, draining into the Mississippi River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Its banks are flanked with red clay, and by the time its waters reach Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana, the damp and soggy soil spouts cypress sloughs and hickory trees.

Yet there are fewer trees flanking those banks than ever before. Millions of acres fewer.

“When most people think about deforestation, they think about the Amazon or even Central America,” said The Conservation Fund’s Louisiana state director, Ray Herndon. “What they may not know is that we have lost more than 24 million acres of bottomland hardwood forest over the last century along the Red River and lower Mississippi River valleys. Habitat destruction is more pronounced here than in any other area of the United States.”

According to scientists from Environmental Synergy Inc. (ESI), a restoration and carbon sequestration firm in Atlanta, decades of conversion from forest to marginal farmland, and the myriad flood control measures that followed, resulted in a land mass that today supports less than five million acres of bottomland hardwood forest.

“No other wetland system in North America has suffered such a tremendous reduction in area,” said Carol Jordan, ESI’s president. “Much of the remaining forest exists in fragments that are too small to support the fish, birds and other wildlife resources that were once abundant.”

The Fund has received Gold Level Validation of this project against the standards of the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), a partnership between leading companies, nonprofits and research institutes seeking to promote integrated solutions to land management around the world. With this goal in mind, the CCBA has developed voluntary standards to help design and identify land management projects that simultaneously minimize climate change, support sustainable development and conserve biodiversity. Download a copy of the Fund’s CCBA application or read our press release to learn more.

You can help. Restoring lands in the lower Mississippi valleys—a task that has called for a mix of public and private financing—is one of The Conservation Fund’s highest priorities.