GREEN RIVER - Much of the private ranchland within the lush Green River Valley in southwest Wyoming is home to the largest concentration of Shiras moose, also known as the Wyoming moose, in North America.

A Wyoming conservation group is challenging the private sector to help keep it that way.

The Nature Conservancy in Wyoming is seeking partners to help fund a series of private lands conservation projects in southwest Wyoming that will focus on restoring and maintaining moose habitat along the Green River.

Officials said the Shiras Moose Conservation Fund aims to create a major habitat island in southwest Wyoming to preserve open space for moose and other wildlife.

Conservancy officials said the group is starting a $250,000 "challenge grant" conservation initiative through Wyoming's Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust Fund to help protect moose living along the eastern slope of the Wyoming Range.

The group has donated $250,000 to the trust for private lands conservation projects, but $150,000 of the dollars will be used only when the trust has raised another $150,000 in matching private funds, said Nature Conservancy communications coordinator Kerry Brophy Lloyd.

If that objective is met, the conservancy's fund will support trust-selected conservation easements on a million-acre stretch of private ranchlands harboring what many believe is the largest population of Shiras moose on the continent, she said.

With matching dollars from the trust fund and the Legislature, the conservancy hopes to raise as much as $1.2 million for on-the-ground conservation efforts with willing landowners.

Bob Budd, executive director of the wildlife trust fund, said the Nature Conservancy's grant contribution deserves to be matched.

"The trust really likes to see these kind of leveraging opportunities," Budd said in a news release. "So does the Legislature."

Officials said the initiative's focus area lies along the Green River in western Wyoming between Bondurant in Sublette County and Kemmerer in Lincoln County. Conservancy officials said moose and moose habitat in the region face increasing threats from growing residential and energy development.

Officials said currently, the landscape in the area remains relatively intact. The area includes many large, longtime family ranches and less energy-development potential than surrounding lands.

Brophy Lloyd said although moose are the primary focus of the initiative, many other wildlife species dependent upon the vast wetlands that branch out from Green River, such as trumpeter swans, whooping cranes, cutthroat trout and leopard frogs, should also benefit.

The Shiras Moose Conservation Fund marks the second grant the nonprofit organization has provided to the Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust Fund. In 2006, the group gave a $250,000 grant for trust-selected projects in the Shirley and Thunder Basin grasslands.

The 2005 legislative session's Wildlife and Natural Resources Funding Act created a $15 million trust fund to preserve and restore wildlife habitat and open spaces. Income from the trust fund is placed into an account to supply grants to nonprofit and government groups for specific purposes.

Southwest Wyoming bureau reporter Jeff Gearino can be reached at 307-875-5359 or at gearino@tribcsp.com.