Joyce Wildlife Management Area
Lake Pontchartrain Basin. Photo courtesy NASA.
Did You Know?
- Louisiana contains almost half of the wetlands found in America’s lower 48 states.
- Louisiana loses wetlands at a rate equal to the size of a football field every hour!
For more than two decades, the Fund has been working to protect and restore Louisiana’s coastal wetland and associated upland habitats, like those found around Lake Pontchartrain.
In 2008, the Fund helped add more than 7,200 acres to the 23,000 Joyce Wildlife Management Area (WMA). Joyce WMA sits five miles south of Hammond within the Lake Pontchartrain basin and consists mainly of cypress-tupelo swamp. Alligators, deer, rabbits, squirrel and waterfowl, like mallards and woodducks, call this area home. An elevated boardwalk at the northwest corner of Joyce WMA provides visitors easy access to view wildlife and vegetation within the ecosystem.
The Joyce WMA is part of a larger network of refuges in the area around Lake Pontchartrain. In partnership with the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we helped create the Big Branch Marsh and Bayou Sauvage national wildlife refuges, which lie in the heart of Louisiana’s commercial and recreational fisheries region. In 2000, we expanded these refuges by an additional 1,300 acres.
The Fund’s long-term commitment to coastal wetlands within the Lake Pontchartrain Basin is an on-going project. We continue to work together with the state of Louisiana to preserve vital coastal wetlands across the region.
