The Nature Conservancy and the state Department of Environmental Management have conserved 27 acres of forest in Tiverton, closing a gap between the Pocasset Ridge Conservation Area, Pardon Gray Preserve and Weetamoo Woods.
The conservancy bought the land for $400,000 with support from the Thomas and Dorothy Ginty Memorial Endowment Fund, the Bafflin Foundation and individual donors. DEM secured a conservation easement using $225,000 from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Legacy Program, funded through the Inflation Reduction Act. The parcel will be managed as part of the Pocasset Ridge Conservation Area.
The purchase adds to a 25-year effort by DEM, the conservancy, the Tiverton Land Trust and the Tiverton Open Space Commission that has protected 1,600 contiguous acres along the ridge overlooking the Sakonnet River. The Forest Legacy Program has contributed more than $750,000 to that work.
“Pocasset Ridge is truly exceptional, a classic example of the type of the diverse, mature forest that covered the Southern New England coast 400 years ago,” said John Berg, the conservancy’s Sakonnet landscape manager. He said the work isn’t finished, and that it matters for clean water and air as much as for wildlife.
The ridge holds a coastal oak-holly forest found only in southeastern New England and considered globally rare. It supports fishers, bobcats and deep-forest songbirds including wood thrushes and scarlet tanagers, and was the last known breeding site for timber rattlesnakes in Rhode Island before the species was considered gone from the state.
Streams rising on the ridge feed the Seapowet Marsh Management Area and the Audubon Society’s Emily Ruecker Wildlife Refuge, habitat for the federally endangered saltmarsh sparrow. The bird nests low in the marsh and is vulnerable to runoff from cleared land upstream.
DEM Director Terry Gray credited the outcome to the partnership among the agencies and the Forest Service.
