Celebrating Our 2025 Conservation Milestones

Land conservation is at the heart of what we do. Working with our community, Jefferson Land Trust has helped protect nearly 19,000 acres of our region’s iconic forests, waterways, farmland, coastlines, wildlife habitat, and open spaces — forever.

Here’s a quick recap of some of our important 2025 conservation milestones.

In 2025, we protected five additional properties totaling 4.78 acres, bringing the total amount of land permanently protected in the corridor to 331 acres. With continued community support, we’ll keep working with interested landowners to protect more land here in the years to come.

Chimacum Creek Watershed

We also continued investing in the Chimacum Creek watershed, which has been the focus of significant community salmon recovery efforts for nearly four decades.

Fun fact: the Land Trust’s very first conservation easement in 1991 was on land lying along the creek, and our first land purchase was on a nearby creekside property! Since then, we’ve permanently protected more than 2,500 acres to support local farms, forests, and fish and wildlife habitat in this important watershed.

Also in the Chimacum Creek watershed is a property we call Chimacum Commons. It was acquired by the Land Trust in 2014 with a threefold vision: to protect productive farmland, restore salmon habitat along Chimacum Creek, and create a pathway for affordable farmworker housing on a portion of the land. During 2025, we made some great progress on our long-held desire to support our farming community with a local housing solution. Thanks to a $197,500 grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce, the Land Trust and our partners at Olympic Housing Trust were able to undertake predevelopment planning for permanently affordable farm- and food-system worker housing — helping move the project from one that’s merely conceptual toward one that’s shovel ready.

Tarboo Creek Watershed

Since 2002, we’ve joined more than 40 local organizations in a large-scale effort to permanently protect land in the Tarboo Creek watershed near Quilcene. The forests, streams, and wetlands of the area provide critical habitat for salmon and other wildlife, and Dabob Bay is one of the most productive estuaries in all of Hood Canal.

In 2025, working with longtime partner Northwest Watershed Institute (NWI), willing landowners, and others, we helped protect two additional properties totaling 177 acres:

• Last summer, we celebrated the protection of a 97-acre forested property near Tarboo Bay, adjacent to the Dabob Bay Natural Area in Quilcene. The property owners, Neal and Ann Koblitz, worked with the Land Trust and Seattle-based nonprofit Northwest Natural Resource Group (NNRG) to place a comprehensive conservation easement on this beautiful piece of forestland.
• In partnership with NWI and the U.S. Navy REPI (Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration) program, we helped facilitate the protection of 81 acres of forest and wetlands in the wildlife corridor that reaches from the headwaters of Tarboo Creek to Dabob Bay. This land will be managed by NWI as part of its 500+ acre Tarboo Wildlife Preserve and provides important habitat for a wide range of local plant and animal species.

Looking Ahead

We’ve also got a healthy list of exciting potential conservation efforts ahead in 2026. We’re working with a number of willing landowners to protect more local farms, forests, and fish and wildlife habitat, including additional property along Chimacum Creek and in the Quimper Wildlife Corridor.