ANNAPOLIS, Md. – The spaces surrounding military bases in the Mid-Atlantic were largely rural and wild when their locations were chosen decades ago. In the years since, though, population growth has pushed development closer and closer to their boundaries, eventually encroaching on some of the buffer spaces needed to carry out missions safely.
That’s why the Sentinel Landscapes program was first developed about a decade ago.
The program is a partnership between the U.S. departments of Defense, Agriculture and Interior, directing funding to landscape conservation that all three departments prioritize for various reasons.
Undeveloped buffers of land around military installations help prevent conflict between residential areas and noisy aircraft or training exercises. But these buffers also have secondary benefits: protecting working rural landscapes, such as farms, and preserving areas for wildlife and water filtration.
The Chesapeake Bay region already includes the Middle Chesapeake Sentinel Landscape, established in 2015 to protect land and waterways near Naval Air Station Patuxent River. And in mid-2023, the federal government designated two additional sentinel landscapes in Virginia that together encompass nearly 3 million acres of the Potomac, Rappahannock, York and James river watersheds.
This Virginia Security Corridor, made up of the Potomac and Tidewater Sentinel Landscapes, encompasses a wide swath of Virginia’s Bay coast from Quantico to Norfolk. The corridor includes 10 military installations representing every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.
The designation does not automatically mean that land will be preserved. But it does give the region “a collaborative and competitive advantage for federal funding,” as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin put it, when opportunities arise for largescale land conservation.
One of the biggest first steps toward that goal is the hiring of coordinators for the two new sentinel landscapes. The coordinators for both the Potomac and Tidewater landscapes will be employees of the Virginia Department of Forestry. Assistant State Forester Terry Lasher said his agency expects to fill the positions in early spring. The Potomac coordinator will be based at Marine Corps Base Quantico, and the Tidewater coordinator will be in Hampton.
Zack Greenberg, a U.S. conservation officer with the Pew Charitable Trusts, has been involved with establishing the new program because “there are inherent co-benefits that Pew, as a conservation organization, is interested in.”
Sentinel landscapes can help marshal resources to address issues that have dogged military installations and their surrounding regions for years. In the Tidewater region, for example, the program could take aim at the problem of sunny-day flooding and sea-level rise that is not only plaguing populated areas but also threatening access to military installations.
Projects could include conservation and restoration work to preserve forests and coastal habitat, Greenberg said, describing what he called “tools in the toolbox of a sentinel landscape.”
Building resilience against climate-induced hazards like flooding is a priority in the Virginia Security Corridor. Protecting forests from wildfires and ensuring they remain to improve air quality also means that Marines at Quantico will still have plenty of room to train outdoors. The program’s efforts to preserve open space could also have benefits for water quality and wildlife in a significant portion of the Bay watershed.
“Conserved areas provide the space necessary to meet [the] mission,” wrote Tom Crabbs, military liaison for Virginia, in an email. “With programs like Sentinel Landscapes, we guard the [installations] from encroachment, manmade and natural, and keep our collective eye on the space needed for future mission requirements.”
Some projects already in the works are the types that could help the program proliferate. Shoreline erosion along the York River was becoming a growing problem at Naval Weapons Station Yorktown. So the Navy partnered with the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences and U.S. National Park Service to secure funding for an oyster reef installation along the coast that carried additional benefits for each of the partners.
“Sentinel landscapes are meant to enable that communication,” Greenberg said. “It’s hard to understand what [the Department of Defense] is doing on the other side of the fence line. But there is a relationship with the community that’s important, and the Sentinel Landscape program can help them address a shared concern.”
The Virginia Security Corridor overlaps with a region of the state where the population continues to grow, especially near military installations. That can put pressure on both military bases and natural resources. Lands in the area are also in demand for data centers, transmission lines and solar installations, which can squeeze out natural areas and working rural lands.
One of the big-picture benefits of the two new sentinel landscapes in Virginia — which are among 13 such landscapes nationwide — is that they connect the geographic dots between two other large sentinel landscapes on the East Coast: the Middle Chesapeake Sentinel Landscape to the north and the Eastern North Carolina Sentinel Landscape to the south.
Taken together, the East Coast sentinel landscapes cover a large piece of the Coastal Plain, where conservation efforts can create corridors for migrating wildlife, help buffer the region against rising sea levels and preserve recreational areas near urban centers. Maps of the new landscapes identify where they also overlap with areas prioritized for conservation because of special resources, such as wetlands or longleaf pine forests.
They also create a roadmap for other government agencies, nonprofits, civic groups and tribes that might want to partner on preserving lands in those areas for a range of other uses.
“This is an exceptional opportunity,” said Lasher of the Virginia Department of Forestry, “to achieve landscape-scale conservation projects that improve the lives of Virginians and positively impact our installation partners.”