Eastern Tallgrass Prairie and Big Rivers Landscape Conservation Cooperative

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Midwest Region, intends to issue a Single Source Cooperative Agreement Award without competition to The Conservation Fund for Mississippi River Basin / Gulf Hypoxia Initiative (MRB/GHI) work as described below.The MRB/GHI, spearheaded by seven Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), used Structured Decision Making to step through a strategic and transparent process to create an integrated framework that supports resource planning and delivery in the Mississippi watershed with multiple benefits for fish and wildlife habitat, water quality and agricultural productivity. This framework consists of multiple quantitative objectives representing three interests (i.e., wildlife, water quality, agriculture), a tiered set of conservation strategies to achieve those objectives within five production agriculture systems (i.e., corn and soybean; grazing lands; floodplain forest; rice; and cotton), and a modeling approach to determine where to best implement those actions within four key ecological systems of the Mississippi River Basin (i.e., headwater row crop fields; upland prairies; mid-sized riparian streams; and mainstem floodplains). The GHI team narrowed the initial scope of implementation from the entire Mississippi River to a smaller set of focal areas in a Preliminary Water Quality Focus Area based on potential for nutrient export from agricultural areas and the priority watersheds of various parties.

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