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The Nature Conservancy, North Carolina

Climate Change Challenge: bigger, hotter fires

grant award: $130,900; year awarded: 2014

The Nature Conservancy is partnering with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore 1,325 acres of southeastern shrub bog wetlands, (known as ‘pocosins’) to re-establish more natural, seasonally-saturated conditions. Threatened by altered precipitation regimes and increased wildfire associated with climate change, historic methods of ditching and drainage has exacerbated periods of low rainfall, resulting in the loss of organic pocosin soil to oxidation and catastrophic wildfire. By installing adjustable water control structures, they will create management conditions that reverse the pattern of subsidence towards one of soil accretion and carbon sequestration.