The Kootenay Conservation Program (KCP) has developed a free online tool to help communities care for their properties in ways that benefit wildlife, water and wild spaces.

The Stewardship Solutions Online Toolkit is a portal to a list of Kootenay-based services and programs that address stewardship issues on private land.

These resources are broken up into 14 regions of the Kootenays, called ‘Conservation Neighbourhoods’, that are identified on an interactive home page map. By clicking on your neighbourhood, you’re taken to the organizations that provide stewardship solutions in your area, which can range from habitat enhancement and restoration to fire prevention, invasive species control, water quality monitoring, wildlife reporting, free environmental farm planning, and more. The Slocan Valley area falls into one of 18 Conservation Neighbourhoods that lists services that private landowners and land managers can access to enhance conservation on their property and deal with common environmental land management issues.

Stewardship Solutions for each neighbourhood are also available as a printed handout (copies are currently being distributed by KCP Partners) and as a downloadable PDF from the website. Convenient symbols show which solutions relate to Wildlife, Habitat, Monitoring, Farms & Ranches, and Funding. For some services, additional resources are available as a download.“We identified in 2018 landowner outreach workshops that coordinated services for private landowners was a huge gap and something that people kept asking for,” said Mahr. “Stewardship Solutions was developed to assist landowners in thinking holistically about their land and managing a suite of issues that come with owning land.”

Stewardship Solutions was made possible thanks to generous funding from Columbia Basin Trust, the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, Fish & Wildlife Compensation Program and the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia.

To access the online toolkit visit: kootenayconservation.ca/toolkit/

as reported in the Valley Voice Aug. 15, 2019