The Nature Conservancy (TNC) partnership supports our commitment to sustainable forest management, water quality and environmental stewardship.  

Since 2017, we’ve supported several TNC initiatives across Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee, including restoring longleaf pine forests, preserving native wildlife habitat, conserving freshwater and implementing sustainable timber practices, all to support local economies. Our investments helped protect 1,886 acres of land, manage 38,602 acres of land with prescribed fire, plant 222,235 trees and engage 942 landowners across the Southeastern United States. 

In the state of Virginia, The Nature Conservancy continued to build a base of protected lands to promote groundcover restoration, rare species recovery, and forest management. In addition to planting longleaf pine seedlings and prescribing fires, TNC launched a groundcover restoration pilot project, working with landowners, agency biologists, consultants and university students. TNC also worked on recovery of three federally listed rare species – the red cockaded woodpecker, the northern long-eared bat and the southeastern fox squirrel.  

In Georgia, TNC conducted a wide range of conservation, restoration and land management activities on the Chattahoochee Fall Line (CFL) near Fort Benning military base. TNC permanently protected 200-acres of land, applied prescribed fire to thousands of acres, and planted longleaf pine seedlings. For long-term restoration and reestablishing the longleaf and shortleaf pines, the organization engaged in forest thinning and the removal of undesirable or non-native species.  

In South Carolina, TNC made significant advances with forest conservation strategies centered on the Sewee Longleaf Conservation Cooperative (SLCC), a 1.7 million-acre native longleaf pine ecosystem anchored by the Francis Marion National Forest (FMNF). In addition to conservation efforts with the FMNF, SLCC works to connect with federal, state, county and private landowners to improve and maintain large, critically important tracts of longleaf pine forest and wildlife habitat. 

In Tennessee, WestRock funding supported the 2021 completion of a critical land acquisition project that saw 1,101-acres – known as the Corum Tract – added to the Bear Hollow Mountain Wildlife Management Area (WMA). This acquisition is important to conservation efforts along Tennessee’s southern border. The tract contains a critical headwater catchment for local waterways, as well as multiple high-priority forest types and threatened species, including plants, birds, bats and reptiles.