In late July, Partnerscapes was honored to work with a broad range of partners—including landowners, agencies, and organizations—to host a partnership forum in the Refugio-Goliad Prairie in the middle Texas Gulf Coast. This prairie is one of last large expanses of native grassland in the Texas mid-coast and has been home to a robust grazing economy along with a diverse wildlife community, including several species that are currently extremely range-limited. It is a landscape dominated by private lands along with some publicly held lands including an important national wildlife refuge and state-owned wildlife management areas.
The area is facing a multitude of ecological and economic challenges, the biggest being brush encroachment and changing land use. Many partners have been working together for decades, but the forum offered all perspectives the chance to share the individual and organizational challenges they are facing along with the opportunities they are seeing. Read a high level summary of the forum here to get a better idea of what is ongoing in this special place for the people that live there, for Texas and the nation.
