CTIC Conservation Connector
The Conservation Technology Information Center, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and Houston Engineering, is leading the development of a new online tool, the CTIC Conservation Connector, as a key element of a new project selected in September 2022 for funding by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities program.
The overall project (ACTION) is being led by the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, which was awarded up to $35 million by USDA to conduct this new partnership pilot. Through their global collaborative, Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management (OpenTEAM), Wolfe’s Neck Center will lead an alliance of over 60 national and regional buyers, funders, and organizations to launch and support climate-smart agricultural pilot projects on farms and ranches in the Northeast, Mountain West, and California.
The CTIC Conservation Connector will allow producers, landowners, and trusted advisors to find programs and service providers who can help plan, implement, and verify voluntary conservation and climate-smart ag practices. CTIC is partnering with Houston Engineering and The Nature Conservancy on the development effort. The CTIC Conservation Connector will bring many benefits to producers, allowing them to find buyers for their climate-smart commodities, to find other programs to support adoption of conservation practices, and to find service providers to help implement them. Additional CTIC Conservation Connector capabilities, including the ability to automatically tap MMRV resources, are planned as later phases of the overall OpenTEAM project.
Now that development of the prototype has begun, CTIC is seeking collaborators who would be willing to participate in a brief (~1 hour) interview where information on their project will be collected and entered into the system. This will help raise the visibility of your program within your target geographies. If you are interested in being interviewed, please contact CTIC's Dave Gustafson at gustafson@ctic.org.
The CTIC Conservation Connector is supported by a subaward on a federal grant funded by USDA under agreement number NR233A750004G032, a project led by OpenTEAM as an initiative of Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment. Support is also being received from the Walton Family Foundation and The Nature Conservancy.