At the beginning of the month, senior fellow Armando Carbonell participated in a White House conference on conservation that included remarks by President Obama and briefings by cabinet officers and senior administration officials on progress to date on the America's Great Outdoors initiative. Lincoln Institute board member Doug Wheeler also attended. The most highlighted initiative was the Crown of the Continent, flagship of the Institute's work on large landscape conservation with longstanding joint-venture partner, the University of Montana's Center for Natural Resource and Environmental Policy, a multi-year effort to bring conservation policy-makers and other stakeholders together to advance conservation planning and practice throughout a region that covers some 19 million acres in the state of Montana in the United States and in the Canadian Provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. The administration has proposed allocating $109 million for a Forest Service-Interior Collaborative Landscape component that aligns both agencies' land acquisition efforts to support community-driven conservation goals in the Crown of the Continent and Longleaf Pine in the Southeast. The federal investments in these large landscapes build on locally led conservation efforts, and will leverage significant private commitments to land and water conservation.