The Nature Conservancy partners with others to protect nature and serve people
Story By Susan Alexander | Photography by Byron Jorjorian & Terry Cook
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 5 (September/October 2026)
The Nature Conservancy builds bridges, literally and figuratively.
The environmental nonprofit, celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, works in land, water, and climate protection in more than 80 countries and all 50 states. Its Tennessee chapter was established in 1978.
Its work is expansive, from raising funds to acquire land that needs protection to removing dams that both inhibit migration to gating caves where endangered bat species live. But in all of these efforts, one aspect is common: it identifies partners to help.
“Many of Tennessee’s most significant conservation successes have been made possible through collaboration with local, state and federal partners and other nonprofits,” says Gabby Lynch, director of land for The Nature Conservancy in Tennessee. “Partnerships are fundamental to…achieving lasting outcomes that benefit both people and nature.”
A look at each of The Nature Conservancy’s priorities helps clarify its activities in Tennessee. Land
From the Mississippi River to the Smoky Mountains, The Nature Conservancy has protected land for conservation while also offering economic opportunities for the surrounding communities.
One of the largest of these properties is the Cumberland Forest Project to Knoxville’s north and northeast. Straddling the Tennessee-Kentucky border, the 100,000-acre Ataya property is made up largely of former coal mines and working forests. A second purchase — of the 153,000-acre Highlands-Lonesome Pine property in southwestern Virginia — was a former coal mining area.
The purchases were possible because of impact investments, which gives private investors an opportunity to support conservation projects that have the potential to earn a profit. In the Cumberland Forest Project, those profits come from sustainable logging and recreational opportunities like the campgrounds and outfitters around Tackett Creek in Campbell County.
Partnering with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, The Nature Conservancy has permanently protected the property through conservation easements that allow for public recreation — hunting and fishing as well as trail riding for off-highway vehicles.
Wait. What? How can those noisy, gas-guzzling all-terrain vehicles be allowed in an area being conserved for its natural environment?
“Off-highway vehicles and motorcycles are incredibly popular,” acknowledges Lynch. “The key is to know it’s here and it’s not going anywhere, so let’s manage it well. Are the trails sited in the right location so the soil doesn’t erode into the water? Is there as little conflict as possible between hikers and riders? OHVs are an economically important recreational option.”
Ronald Lambert is The Nature Conservancy’s land protection manager in the Tackett Creek area. He makes sure that off-road vehicles aren’t impacting the streams where the endangered blackside dace fish swim. It’s just one of several species the conservancy protects there.
Lambert and his TWRA partners monitor 150 miles of trails at Tackett Creek and flag problems to be addressed, minimizing runoff and sedimentation in the area’s streams and wetlands. That may involve putting in culverts or drainage ditches, grading the road or putting down gravel. “Riders may see a bump in the road, but they don’t know it’s directing water.”
They also direct trails away from animal habitats. “We have a pretty healthy elk population, and we try to limit OHV travel around them, especially during breeding and calving seasons,” Lambert says. Bats like to frequent abandoned mine portals; the trails don’t enter those areas.
“Our overall message is we’re not there to shut the trails down,” Lambert says. “We’re there to manage it and make it safe and enjoyable while protecting the ecological value of the land. We want to show that recreation and conservation can coexist.”
Another land conservation project in East Tennessee is the Doe Mountain Recreation Area in Johnson County, in the very tip of upper East Tennessee near Mountain City. It’s an 8,600-acre forested mountain that offers access to OHVs and motorcyclists as well as mountain bikers and hikers. It has an archery course and a historic fire tower.
“Land and water conservation can serve multiple benefits,” Lynch says. “We like to show it’s good for nature and also good for the bottom line for these communities, with campgrounds, small engine repair shops and other small businesses serving the area.”
Water
Johnson County is also the site of some freshwater protection projects The Nature Conservancy has taken on. Shady Valley, a tiny community there, was home to rare peat wetlands, or bogs, many of which had been drained and converted to farmland in the mid-20th century.
The Nature Conservancy purchased two of those bogs and surrounding acreage in the 1990s and restored several tributaries of Beaverdam Creek to their natural hydrology, supporting rare plants and animals, including the tiny bog turtle. These properties now host conservation-friendly agriculture across the landscape. Shady Valley hosts a Cranberry Festival each October to celebrate the product from those bogs. This year’s festival will be held October 9 and 10, 2026.
Dam removal has been a priority for the conservancy’s freshwater staff. The Lower Citico Creek Dam in the Cherokee National Forest was built in the 1970s to protect a trout fishery on Citico Creek. Over time, “our understanding of fisheries management changed and we learned that trying to keep out native species to protect introduced species wasn’t supported by evidence,” says Rob Bullard, director of water for The Nature Conservancy. The conservancy, the U.S. Forest Service and Trout Unlimited partnered to remove the dam last fall to improve migration of the fish that inhabit the creek. The removal reconnected 76 upstream perennial miles of river.
“A lot of the results were almost immediate,” Bullard says. “The University of Tennessee tagged some redline darters pre- and post-dam removal, and after the dam was removed they found redline darters several hundred yards upstream within just a few weeks.”
The project led to a much larger effort to restore watersheds across East Tennessee, especially in the Cherokee National Forest, Bullard says. The conservancy and its partners are studying and inventorying stream barriers created by road systems and aiming to provide more natural water flow for the species that live there.
What they’re learning has been applied to the recovery effort still underway post-Hurricane Helene. “The scale of Helene recovery is unlike anything this area has seen for a long time,” Bullard says. “Some of the lessons we’ve learned in places like Citico have put us in a good position to work together around Helene recovery. Where it makes sense, we can build things back with more resiliency.”
Climate
Protecting large swaths of forested land goes a long way in combatting climate change while preparing for it at the same time. Three hundred sixty acres of the Cumberland Forest Project — land that was previously mined for coal — are being used to establish solar energy and battery storage projects by private businesses. The surrounding forests store and sequester carbon and support wildlife.
The central Appalachians, in which the Cumberland Forest Project is located, is one of the most biodiverse areas in the eastern U.S., with populations of rare salamanders, freshwater mussels, native fish, elk, and other at-risk species. Scientists have identified the region as critical to the south-to-north movement of species as the climate continues to warm.
It offers a range of microclimates that allow plant species to repopulate farther north or higher in elevation as temperatures rise. And where plants shift, animals follow.
Caves
Twenty percent of known caves in the United States — almost 12,000 of them — are located in Tennessee, according to Cory Holliday, who is the cave and karst program director for the conservancy. In addition to numerous species of bats, these caves harbor hundreds of vulnerable species—mostly crustaceans, insects, and arachnids—that live exclusively in these subterranean habitats.
A lot of the caves are located on private property, and the conservancy doesn’t name their locations in order to protect them. But they work with landowners to develop management plans and to install cave gates, “big, ugly heavy things we don’t like building,” Holliday says, “but signage doesn’t work for everybody.” The gates allow bats, but not people, access to the caves.
The work done by the conservancy and their partners, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and TVA, has led to significant increases in the number of gray bats in East Tennessee.
“They are making a really strong recovery, largely due to the efforts of protecting their cave roosts,” Holliday says. “And there are more roosts in Tennessee than anywhere else, so that recovery is very significant.”
Saving bats helps control insects and protect forests, Holliday says, which is good for people too. Just like Bullard says, a free-flowing stream protects the small fish that live there, which helps keep water clean. Conservation is about protecting that cycle of interdependence among species and environments. Those connections matter. The Nature Conservancy has been protecting them for 75 years. ◆
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