LIS Partnership Announces New Stewardship Strategy

The Long Island Sound Partnership has announced a new Stewardship Strategy to support the Long Island Sound Stewardship Initiative and its 33 designated Long Island Sound Stewardship Areas.. The Initiative, established in 2006, designated the 33 areas, 17 in Connection and 16 in New York, of land and water with outstanding or exemplary scientific, educational, or biological value for protection, management or acquisition. Since 2005, the Partnership has invested a total of $35 million in protecting and restoring habitat, educating the public, and improving access at the different Stewardship Area locations. The development of the Stewardship Strategy reemphasizes the Partnership’s commitment to the Initiative through a series of recommendations driven by the Stewardship Areas’ current challenges, needs, and priorities.

Over the past year, LIS Partnership staff met with Stewardship Area managers to identify challenges, needs, and priorities, which are summarized in the strategy and categorized by the Partnership’s 2025 Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan goal to identify connections and drive future implementation. Priorities include improving water quality, filling in data gaps through monitoring and research, restoring and protecting important habitat, increasing coastal resiliency, ensuring adequate staffing capacity, improving education and outreach programs, and supporting public access.

The recommendations, derived from Stewardship Area manager discussions, aim to identify, protect, and enhance upland sites within the Long Island Sound ecosystem with significant ecological, educational, open space, public access, or recreational value. Recommendations include developing a Stewardship Network to provide a platform for the site managers and partners to collaborate and communicate on initiatives, projects, and lessons learned; establishing a framework to address existing site-specific challenges, priorities, and needs; revamping a process to identify and add new Long Island Sound Stewardship Areas; and enhancing education and outreach about the Stewardship Initiative. In particular, by developing a network, the Long Island Sound Partnership and Stewardship Area managers and their partners can work together to strengthen partnerships and address site-specific challenges, needs, and priorities to better protect and restore the Sound.

The Partnership recognizes the ecological importance of these sites, their benefits to surrounding coastal communities, and the need for long-term sustainability of investments. Through this strategy, the Long Island Sound Partnership reaffirms its commitment to sustaining viability of Stewardship Sties, by strengthening collaboration, leveraging additional resources and expanding stewardship efforts. The expected outcomes of this network are to increase acres of habitat restored and protected, strengthen community resiliency, and ensure investments last for generations to come.

The Stewardship Strategy is available in the media center of the LIS Partnership website. Information about each of the LIS Stewardship Areas is available in the Long Island Sound section of the website.