Red River National Wildlife Refuge
Cypress trees. Photo by Don Mace/Dreamstime.
At A Glance
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 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.
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.
Forest Restoration Initiative
We’re working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to buy and restore about 1,180 acres of marginal farmland within the boundary of Red River NWR. Using donations from Go Zero, the Fund will restore the entire acreage to its native bottomland hardwood forest habitat in two phases. Once restored, the land will be conveyed to the USFWS as an addition to the Red River National Wildlife Refuge for permanent protection and long-term stewardship.
Gold Validation
We are proud that five of our Go Zero projects have been validated at the gold level under the Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Standards—no other group in the nation has as many.
The Fund has received Gold Level Validation of the Red River NWR 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.
