Whatcom Land Trust Works with Community Partners to Protect Land and Reduce Transportation Carbon Footprint
By Lorraine Wilde
This past October, Whatcom Land Trust (the Trust) partnered with Whatcom Million Trees and Whatcom Transportation Authority (WTA) to protect 51 additional acres at Kelsey Nature Reserve along Lake Terrell. These forested and open wetlands, that include a section of salmon-bearing Butler Creek, provide critical habitat for a variety of wildlife. The new land acquisition connects the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Lake Terrell Wildlife Management area with an existing Trust property, the Ruth Kelsey Nature Reserve (Kelsey), in Ferndale.
This land was strategically chosen to grow a fish and wildlife corridor that connects the 1,200 protected acres of Lake Terrell with now a total of 71 acres of open and forested wetlands that surround a section of Butler Creek known to be used as spawning grounds by the Federally Threatened coho salmon. “The properties were close to being connected. But now they’re officially connected as one big, connected wildlife corridor,” explains Trust Conservation Director and Interim Executive Director Alex Jeffers.
Together, this partnership results in more environmental benefit than either could have achieved individually—including further offsetting some of WTA’s bus transit carbon emissions.
Community Partnerships Achieve Multiple Goals
“WTA was looking for conservation projects they could invest in locally, rather than just sort of paying money into a carbon credit program where the money goes somewhere and then you never see it again,” remembers Jeffers. “They wanted to have those benefits stay as local as possible, so they provided $150,000 of funding towards the $600,000 purchase price. We often work to combine funding sources to purchase conservation properties, but this was our first with WTA.”
This purchase was just one small part of WTA’s long-term decarbonization strategy. “A major task is transitioning the bus fleet to all zero-emission technology, like electricity or hydrogen, by 2040,” explains WTA’s General Manager Les Reardanz. “That transition will take a while and a lot is still left to be determined.”
WTA’s successful Transit for Trees program in Fall 2023 enabled the purchase of young tree and shrub seedlings to be planted by another community partner, Whatcom Million Trees. “We were looking for additional creative, innovative solutions to continue to decarbonize,” remembers Reardanz. “Whatcom Million Trees helped us determine and calculate just how much preserving older forests would contribute to decreasing our carbon footprint in the years ahead.”
A Carbon Sequestration Report (August 21, 2024) prepared by Whatcom Million Trees Project estimates that the two properties together will sequester and offset the annual emissions of 2.5 diesel buses or 4.5 hybrid buses. Planting 1,000 new conifers at either property would sequester 50-80 additional tons of carbon per year, on average, over 50 years.
Stewardship & Ecological Values
Janet Murray, one of more than 120 volunteer land stewards that assist the Trust in monitoring and caring for conservation properties, has stewarded the original Kelsey property over the past 12 years. “The most exciting part of this whole thing for me is that now we have a good chunk of Butler Creek, the part of the creek where there might be spawning happening,” explains Murray.
Murray has already observed a salmon redd, or nest dug by female salmon in the streambed to incubate their eggs, on the new property. “I know for a fact there’s baby fish in there, so there’s somebody spawning.”
Next steps for the Trust will be to survey the property and develop additional long-term conservation plans. That will include mapping the existing plant species, including non-native invasive species. Lake Terrell has several known invasive species, including aquatic plants.
Murray noted that some invasives have already been spotted, including yellow iris, English hawthorn, and the usual suspects—reed canary grass, morning glory, Himalayan blackberry, and holly.
“We also have deer, salamanders more than once, lots of frogs and amphibians,” notes Murray. “[North Cascades] Audubon has people who do surveys out there, and one of the people who used to do the surveys all the time said she had, I think, 22 species of birds. There’s probably porcupine, certainly coyotes.”
Although public access will be considered during long-term planning, right now, there is no infrastructure to support public access.
Better Together
“By partnering on this project, a first of its kind for WTA, we are leveraging each other’s strengths to help the environment across the board, while preserving these values into the future together. The impact will be greater together than anything we could have accomplished individually,” said Reardanz. “This project gave us, as a local agency, the opportunity to invest in local nonprofits through local partnerships, in turn preserving land locally and benefiting the local environment, right here in Whatcom County.”
Whatcom Land Trust works to protect and care for Whatcom County for future generations. Support from community members like you helps ensure healthy forests, climate resilience and outdoor access opportunities.
