Heartland Rewilding was created through a partnership between Project Coyote, The Rewilding Institute, and the Half-Earth Project. The goal of the partnership is to dedicate staff and resources to address the critical Mississippi River watershed, an area that covers a third of North America. This new coalition ambitiously aims to address the loss of 90 percent of natural areas across the continent’s largest watershed to restore a healthier landscape for humans and wildlife.

Heartland Rewilding aims to work with a network of environmental organizations and government agencies to provide the strategy, staff, and resources needed to protect wildlife and advocate for reform in conservation policies and practices using sound science. The initiative will build a framework for rewilding large landscapes across the entire Mississippi River watershed, which spans from New York to Montana and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Heartland Rewilding’s first three projects will focus on the Loess Hills of Iowa and Nebraska, the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, and the Missouri Ozarks. These landscape regions, identified through previous work done by The Rewilding Institute, contain pockets of habitat and serve as unprotected corridors for wildlife throughout the central Midwest. Rewilding these regions is critical to Heartland Rewilding’s success.