Conservation Incentive Program Paves Way for Landscape-Level Wildlife Habitat Improvement
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Conservation Incentive Program continues to pay big dividends for wildlife habitat in Arkansas. During July’s regularly scheduled meeting, AGFC Commissioners heard a presentation on the status of the program, which is now in its second year with plans already underway to hit the ground running for a third round of conservation funding to help private landowners increase wildlife habitat on their property.
“More than 85 percent of the land in Arkansas is privately owned,” said Garrick Dugger, chief of the AGFC’s Private Lands Habitat Division. “That means that even if we accomplish all of our goals on the public land we control, we’ve still improved less than a quarter of the state’s habitat to make changes on a landscape level. Private land practices have always been the deciding factor in the improvement of wildlife on a population level. Many landowners want to improve the habitat on their property, but don’t have the expertise or the financial means to make it happen, and that’s where the AGFC’s Private Lands Habitat Division can make a difference.”
In 2024, with help from $3.5 million in set-aside funds from the Arkansas General Assembly, the AGFC was able to launch CIP as a pilot program to incentivize and assist private landowners to improve wildlife habitat on their properties through a set of approved practices. Prescribed fire, forest thinning, wetland management, and feral hog trapping were among the nine practices authorized for cost-share reimbursement through the program.
The program hit the ground running, with 585 landowner applications funded and more than 16,000 acres of habitat improved, but that was just a taste of what could be possible with the right funding and time. According to Michelle Furr, program coordinator for the AGFC, nearly 1,600 applications came in, representing all but one of Arkansas’s counties.
“If we saw anything else, we saw the extreme need for such assistance in Arkansas landowners,” Furr said. “The first year of the program was managed on a first-come, first-served basis and we reached the limit of landowners we could help in some of the practices in less than a month. The total time until all practices were claimed took about 8 months, but most of them were spoken for very quickly.”
That progress led the way for the AGFC’s Private Land Habitat Division to pursue additional grants to directly support private landowners in managing their land for wildlife.
“We’ve made selections for a new group of landowners and are now completing CIP 2.0,” Furr said. “While the set-aside was not available this year, we were able to secure a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service to continue our effort for private landowners. That grant’s purpose is to improve forest health, reduce wildfire risk and enhance wildlife habitat, all of which were covered by certain practices in our original program.”
The second iteration of CIP being implemented this year has a few substantial changes.
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