Jan 6, 2019 2 min read

CALIFORNIA – A conservation program affiliated with California University of Pennsylvania has received a significant foundation grant to continue restoring fish and wildlife habitats in the state.

The $800,000 grant was awarded to the university’s foundation to fund the ongoing efforts of the Cal U.-based Partners for Fish and Wildlife, university spokeswoman Christine Kindl announced Friday.

“Our projects target species that are declining in Pennsylvania and throughout the eastern United States,” said Jose Taracido, a Cal U. employee who supervises the Partners’ farmland habitat program.

The money will be used over the next two years to fence and enhance more than 35 miles of streambank, restore 400 acres of upland areas of young forests and pollinator habitat and 130 wetland acres and improve five miles of a stream to allow fish to move more freely.

The Richard King Mellon Foundation, which has been a longtime supporter of the program, awarded the grant.

Among the other work of Taracido’s team involved major restorations to Pike Run, a tributary to the Monongahela River near the university.

That $300,000 project, which was completed in 2017, corrected erosion problems by driving a series of hemlock logs 30 feet long vertically into the ground and then topping them off with horizontal logs that line the stream’s banks from the Mon-Fayette Expressway to just short of the river. Logs were similarly assembled across the stream in many locations to make small dams and waterfalls that have created healthy environments for aquatic insects and for fish in the river to come upstream to spawn, Taracido has said.

The Mellon foundation money will support work on Chestnut Ridge in the Laurel Mountains involving stream and habitat work to improve conditions for eastern brook trout and monarch butterflies.

The monarch population has dropped by 90 percent since 1990 because of a lack of habitat, according to Taracido.