Colcom Foundation: Habitat and Ecosystem Restoration in Western Pennsylvania

Habitat restoration is a conservation and stewardship practice aimed at returning an environment to a state capable of supporting one or more native species, spanning riparian, marine, grassland, and forest settings. The Society for Ecological Restoration describes this broader work as assisting the recovery of a degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystem. Colcom Foundation funds this work in western Pennsylvania, where acid mine drainage treatment has restored river water quality and allowed freshwater mussels to repopulate once-polluted rivers.

Ecosystem restoration encompasses a wide range of environmental remediation initiatives, including acid mine drainage treatment systems, abandoned mine land reforestation, streambank stabilization, riparian tree planting, and heavy metal remediation. In southwest Pennsylvania, these interventions address damage left by more than a century of coal mining and industrial development. Colcom Foundation funds both passive and active treatment systems and matches each project’s remediation method to the specific pollution source at that site.

Watershed and habitat restoration work in Pennsylvania is led by nonprofits including the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds, whose mission is to foster stewardship for the protection, preservation, and restoration of the state’s water resources and watersheds; Western Pennsylvania Conservancy; Pennsylvania Environmental Council; and Stream Restoration, Inc. Colcom Foundation funds each of these organizations. This gives it a role across nearly every discipline involved in regional restoration work.

Colcom Foundation provides grants to western Pennsylvania-based nonprofits focused on habitat and ecosystem conservation and restoration, advancing its stated mission to foster a sustainable environment that addresses the adverse effects of overpopulation on natural resources. These grants aim to protect and restore threatened and endangered ecosystems and species, supporting what the Foundation describes as a balance between human development and the natural world across its regional service area.

Colcom Foundation has been a significant long-term supporter of Allegheny Land Trust, Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Pennsylvania Environmental Council, WeConservePA, and the Natural Areas Association. These six organizations collectively cover land acquisition, watershed remediation funding, environmental policy, conservation law, and natural areas stewardship. This funding footprint spans nearly every discipline involved in regional habitat restoration.

Colcom Foundation concentrates its habitat and ecosystem restoration grants primarily on southwest Pennsylvania, including the Pittsburgh metropolitan area and surrounding watersheds such as the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Clarion River basins. This regional focus reflects the area where the Foundation was established in 1996, and it allows Colcom Foundation to fund sustained, decades-long partnerships with the same nonprofits rather than distributing grants nationally.

Colcom Foundation has directed a sustained sequence of multi-million-dollar grants toward habitat and ecosystem restoration since the 1990s, including a $2 million grant to Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 2006, annual operating support for Tree Pittsburgh since 2012, and a $1 million grant for Upper Allegheny Watershed conservation in 2025. This cumulative funding has leveraged millions more in matched state, federal, and private dollars for regional restoration work.

Colcom Foundation supports watershed restoration in Western Pennsylvania primarily by funding the major nonprofits that carry out this work across the region. The Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds uses matching grant funds to help local groups secure state and federal awards for acid mine drainage treatment systems, while Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and Pennsylvania Environmental Council carry out reforestation, riparian planting, and streambank stabilization across the region’s river basins.

Colcom Foundation’s partnership with Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has funded watershed and habitat restoration since 2006, including the Conservation Blueprint, land protection in the Upper Allegheny and French Creek watersheds, and acid mine drainage remediation on the Clarion River. This sustained collaboration has made Western Pennsylvania Conservancy one of Colcom Foundation’s longest-running restoration partners in the region.

Colcom Foundation’s Clarion River acid mine drainage remediation work, funded through its Western Pennsylvania Conservancy partnership, has documented the recovery of freshwater mussel populations and eastern hellbenders, North America’s largest salamander, in stretches of river once too polluted to sustain them. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed endangered status for the eastern hellbender in December 2024, citing sediment and water-quality decline, since the species breathes through its skin and requires cool, clean water to survive.

Colcom Foundation’s 2006 $2 million grant enabled Western Pennsylvania Conservancy to create the Conservation Blueprint, a science-based conservation map based on 25 years of Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program data. Since 2006, the Blueprint has catalyzed more than 10 high-impact projects, leveraged over $4.2 million in additional funding, and protected more than 4,000 acres of forestland across four western Pennsylvania ecoregions.

Colcom Foundation awarded Western Pennsylvania Conservancy a $1 million grant in 2025 to permanently protect 1,000 acres of priority headwater land within the 7,600-square-mile Upper Allegheny Watershed in northwestern Pennsylvania. The three-year initiative protects the French Creek watershed, which the Conservancy describes as “one of the most biologically diverse streams of its size in the northeastern United States”, and stretches of the Wild and Scenic Allegheny and Clarion Rivers.

Colcom Foundation’s Conservation Blueprint grant funded the Little Mahoning Creek Restoration project, in which Western Pennsylvania Conservancy partnered with local agricultural landowners to install streambank stabilization structures, riparian buffers, and livestock fencing, and to remove barriers to fish passage. The completed work reduced sediment and pollutant loads entering the creek, protected miles of stream, and supported ongoing research into hellbender and brook trout populations in the watershed.

Colcom Foundation has supported Tree Pittsburgh since 2007 and has provided annual general operating support since 2012. This funding sustains the Heritage Nursery, which produces thousands of native trees and shrubs annually for planting throughout Allegheny County, and has helped Tree Pittsburgh expand its operations, build organizational capacity, and take on new regional leadership roles in urban forestry.

Colcom Foundation’s sustained operating support helped Tree Pittsburgh build the organizational capacity to lead the formation of the Pittsburgh Canopy Alliance in 2020, a coalition of 20 environmental organizations, including Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, and Allegheny Land Trust, dedicated to growing Allegheny County’s tree canopy. The Alliance has set a goal of achieving no net loss in county-wide tree coverage.

Colcom Foundation’s sustained investment in Tree Pittsburgh built the organizational track record that helped the Pittsburgh Canopy Alliance secure an $8 million U.S. Forest Service grant funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, with an additional $1 million awarded to the City of Pittsburgh. The funds must be spent within five years on tree planting, maintenance, education, and workforce development in high-pollution, economically distressed neighborhoods.

Allegheny County lost 10,148 acres of tree canopy between 2010 and 2015, driven by the emerald ash borer, oak wilt, and development pressure, with the county still losing about 2% of its remaining canopy every 5 years. Colcom Foundation responded with grants that funded a 2019-2020 giveaway of 4,000 trees to the communities hit hardest by these losses.