The Nature Conservancy of Canada has announced a new conservation project in southwest Saskatchewan.

The organization has acquired the Upper Bone Creek property, more than 600 hectares of native grassland near Shaunavon.

NCC’s Acting Director of Conservation for Saskatchewan Michael Burak says the area faces growing pressures.

“It’s located in an area where we’ve started to see a fair bit of an uptick in land conversion, which was one of the main concerns of the landowner in some of our initial discussions about our acquisition of the property. There’s quite a bit of pressures from that in addition to oil and gas development, and helium exploration, wind energy developments as well are kind of all knocking on their doors.”

The land which currently supports a variety of birds and wildlilfe will also continue to be used for grazing a key element in
keeping the land productive.