Employees Donate Personal Time to Land Rehabilitation in Nevada
Last month, members of our team in Nevada took part in the Elko District Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sagebrush seedling-planting project. Newmont, the National Department of Wildlife, Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW), the Nevada Muleys and Barrick Gold sponsored the event.
In the summer of 2016, a lightning strike 35 miles north of Battle Mountain, Nevada, started the wildfire that is now called the Hot Pot wildfire. The fire burned over 120,000 acres of land in an area that included a large amount of prime sagebrush habitat and native vegetation that provides essential food and shelter for many wildlife species in the region including mule deer.
Matt Murphy, fuels manager with the Elko District BLM, spoke with a local news channel about the purpose of the event: “We are trying to get sagebrush back into that ecosystem so that we have a little bit of habitat for mule deer as they go into winter next year.”
On a bright March day, 75 volunteers from the community, including 19 Newmont employees, worked together for six hours planting over 2,500 sagebrush seedlings and installing protective netting around each seedling on ~9 acres along a hillside 27 miles north of Battle Mountain. With the combined efforts of the volunteers and some growing success in the coming years, hundreds of acres acres of sagebrush landscape may soon be restored.
Newmont has long had a commitment to environmental stewardship in the region, working with public and private partners on conservation efforts for over 20 years. Most recently, we signed a mutual agreement to manage more than 1.5 million acres of sagebrush habitat in Nevada, one of six elements comprising our Sagebrush Ecosystem Conservation Program.
To learn more about our commitment to biodiversity management and conservation, visit our 2016 sustainability report, Beyond the Mine.
