Natural Areas Association (NAA) is an association of scientists and practitioners focused on the management of ecologically significant natural landscapes with the intent to protect biodiversity for current and future generations. Natural Areas News is your trusted resource for current events, reliable science, conservation success, emerging challenges, best practices, and achievements of those who work daily to preserve natural areas.

Photo courtesy of Terry Seidel/The Nature Conservancy

To walk the rugged trails of what is now the called the Joy Valley Nature Preserve is to journey through Ohio’s ancient past while glimpsing at a hopeful blueprint for its ecological future. This new preserve hosts a vast ecosystem that thrives largely undisturbed, offering sanctuary to rare plants and animals found almost nowhere else on Earth.

New Zealand has started one of the most ambitious conservation projects in the world to save its threatened species. The country has committed to eliminating invasive predators by 2050. In all, it will mean killing tens of millions of non-native animals. Eradicating invasive predators from all of would be the largest invasive species removal in the world.

Using high-resolution aerial imagery and machine learning, researchers mapped more than 1,200 individual beaver ponds across Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Oregon to determine which factors best explained their size. By linking pond size to dam length, vegetation and stream power, researchers give land managers more precise tools to anticipate water storage, biodiversity and climate resilience.

Photos courtesy of S. Perles/NPS & Regina Snow/USFWS

Join NAA on October 16, 2025, for a 3-hour virtual symposium that will convene leading scientists, land management practitioners, and wildlife professionals, who have spent decades focused on high white-tailed deer populations as a leading cause of reductions in local biodiversity and a major factor in the prevention of forest regeneration. Sessions will highlight evidence-based research underscoring the need for deer management in natural areas.

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Recent YouTube Releases

Radical Resilience and Wild Carbon

September 12, 2025

Job Opportunities

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Funding Opportunities

Vermont Biodiversity Protection Fund

Deadline: November 15, 2025

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