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A Novel Approach to Protecting Threatened WildlifeAlabama's newest bank, unveiled last month in Mobile County, has no checking accounts or automated teller machines. It is a conservation bank--Alabama's first. The "deposits" are conservation credits earned by preserving habitat for the gopher tortoise, a threatened species. The customers are landowners who could not get building permits because tortoises live on their property. Working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Mobile Sewer and Water Commissioners and others, we designed the conservation bank to protect tortoises while also helping property owners. Due to development, the longleaf pine forests preferred by the tortoise have been fragmented and severely degraded. The tortoises, which live up to 70 years, have become isolated on small lots and have trouble reproducing."If we hadn't done something, many gopher tortoises in this area would have been doomed," says our economist Robert Bonnie. The money from the sale of credits will be used to relocate the tortoises safely and manage their new habitat, 220 acres of longleaf pine forest set aside by the Mobile water commissioners. We also plan to set up a fund to help low-income landowners purchase credits. If the bank is successful, this new approach may be used to save thousands of acres for gopher tortoises. Recently, we helped International Paper design a similar conservation bank in Georgia for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. Already, the number of woodpeckers has increased from a lonely three males to 30 birds, an impressive return on investment. "These projects serve as a model for the future of endangered species on private land," says Bonnie.
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