Causes: Environment

Mission: Our mission is to create the largest nature reserve in the contiguous United States, a refuge for people and wildlife preserved forever as part of America’s heritage.

Results: The innovative model for building American Prairie calls for stitching together three million acres of existing public lands using private lands purchased from willing sellers. Unlike the creation of national parks through government action, American Prairie is connecting large swaths of fragmented public lands through the strategic purchase of private lands. Biologists have determined that a prairie would need to be around 5,000 square miles in size (roughly 3.2 million acres) in order to be a fully functioning ecosystem complete with migration corridors and all native wildlife. By building on existing protected lands, American Prairie can buy a relatively small amount of land and still achieve landscape-scale results. Using the American Prairie model, a patchwork of ownership transforms into a seamless prairie ecosystem. When these fragmented public and private lands are connected, the prairie will provide a continuous land area collaboratively managed for wildlife and recreation, the largest of its kind in the Lower 48 states. Since 2004, American Prairie has completed 32 transactions to build our habitat base of 420,425 acres. Of this total:105,378 acres are private lands owned by American Prairie315,047 acres are public lands (federal and state) leased by American Prairie