SERPPAS marks 20 years of partnership while looking toward the challenges ahead
For two decades, the Southeast Regional Partnership for Planning and Sustainability (SERPPAS) has brought together leaders from the military, state agencies and federal natural resources, wildlife, ocean and working lands organizations to address a shared set of challenges across the Southeast. At its core, SERPPAS is built on a simple but consequential idea: military readiness, conservation, working lands and resilient communities are not separate priorities. In many places, they depend on one another.
That shared understanding shaped the 2026 SERPPAS Principals Meeting in Pinehurst and Southern Pines, North Carolina. Convened during the partnership’s 20th anniversary year, the meeting created space to reflect on the impacts of SERPPAS to date, affirmed the newly revised strategic plan and focused senior leaders on the emerging issues that will require continued attention and coordination in the years ahead.
By all accounts, the meeting was marked by strong engagement and investment. Agenda topics ensured participant attentiveness, discussions remained focused, and the meeting structure encouraged principals to move beyond updates to substantive dialogue about where and how the partnership can add value next.
“One thing that stood out about the people in the room was how engaged they were,” said Amanda Gobeli, partnerships coordinator for the South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative (SASMI). “These are busy people who are juggling many priorities within their agencies, but they not only made the effort to attend the full meeting but also to contribute meaningful dialogue on the topics at hand. Attendees were locked in and focused on addressing the issues.”
Honoring the partnership’s foundation
The first full day opened by grounding the meeting in SERPPAS’s history and purpose. A session moderated by NRI’s Dr. Roel Lopez invited reflection on the partnership’s first 20 years and the values that have allowed it to endure. That conversation set an important tone for the rest of the meeting: SERPPAS has been effective because of the culture of trust, continuity and shared problem-solving developed among its partners.
Since 2005, SERPPAS has served as a regional forum for identifying where national defense priorities overlap with land conservation, natural resource stewardship, community well-being and economic sustainability. Its work has supported collaborative efforts to minimize encroachment on military installations while advancing partner missions across the Southeast.
That history was not treated as a retrospective exercise alone. Instead, it provided context for the meeting’s central question: what does a mature, trusted partnership do next?
A strategic plan shaped for the next phase
The 2026 Principals Meeting also marked an important moment for the partnership’s future direction. SERPPAS leaders acknowledged the approved and newly revised strategic plan, which will guide work over the next three to five years. The plan focuses the partnership around three goals: strengthen military readiness and resilience, safeguard compatible lands and land uses and advance regulatory efficiency and consistency. To achieve these goals, SERPPAS aligns working groups around regional, scalable and important topics: Southeast Sentinel Landscapes, natural resources management, wildland fire, coastal resilience and regional adaptation.
During the “SERPPAS Today” session, Addie Thornton, SERPPAS coordinator at NRI, joined state and agency leaders in inviting principals to reflect on the strategic plan and identify what is resonating most strongly with their agencies. The format underscored that the plan is a framework for shaping shared action.
“The revised strategic plan reflects a partnership that is not standing still but positioning itself to address the next generation of regional challenges with clarity and purpose,” Addie said.
The meeting’s agenda reinforced a practical point: SERPPAS is most useful when it helps partners connect long-term priorities to real decisions on the ground. That connection appeared repeatedly throughout the meeting, from installation resilience and land conservation to military training needs and regional wildlife connectivity.
Seeing partnership at work in the North Carolina Sandhills
The meeting’s North Carolina setting offered a meaningful backdrop. Sessions on Fort Bragg, the North Carolina Sandhills and the Eastern North Carolina Sentinel Landscape highlighted how conservation partnerships can directly support the military mission while protecting ecological and working lands.
Presentations on the Army’s role in longleaf pine conservation and the regional partnerships surrounding Fort Bragg traced a line from the early collaborative work that helped inspire SERPPAS to the more integrated landscape-scale approaches now underway. The meeting then moved into a mobile session at Paint Hill Farm, where participants saw an on-the-ground example of a “ Readiness and Recreation “ project supporting Fort Bragg. The site visit focused on land conservation, fire management, species management and the local partnerships that help sustain compatible landscapes around military installations.
The mobile meeting served a larger purpose than showcasing a single project. It placed principals in the landscape they were discussing and illustrated how local conservation action, military readiness and regional planning are compatible and linked through partnership.
Addie shared that partners said seeing the conserved landscape firsthand and meeting the partners behind the work made the value of the partnership tangible and meaningful. It was directly connected to and enhanced the conversations we continued during the meeting.
Looking ahead: readiness, working forests and regional corridors
The second day of the meeting shifted from reflection to forward-looking challenges that may require deeper engagement with SERPPAS.
One session focused on the military training operational needs in the Southeast towards the use of a variety of landscapes and environments that may not be available within the fenceline of existing installations. Leaders from Marine Corps Installations East discussed the Maritime Center of Excellence concept and the growing importance of waterborne training locations, access to range complexes and coordination with public lands and partner agencies to meet the new demands. Principals were invited to consider how training and testing needs may continue to evolve across the landscape, what partners should be aware of as those needs shift and ways to advance win-win opportunities.
A second session examined the pressures facing working forests in the Southeast. Declining markets for forest products and associated mill closures, altered supply chains and continued development are changing the landscapes that buffer military installations and support conservation goals. The discussion framed working forests not as a single-sector issue, but as a shared regional concern with implications for land stewardship, rural economies, species conservation and defense-compatible landscapes that can continue to support the natural resource programs within the installation fenceline. Participants were asked to consider whether SERPPAS has a role in helping partners explore coordinated solutions to ensure healthy working forests remain in the Southeast.
The final major discussion centered on a regional corridor concept linking landscapes, readiness and wildlife. Moderated by Buck MacLaughlin, program manager at NRI, the session explored how connected landscapes could support biodiversity, working lands, public access, rural economies and long-term compatibility with military operations. As an example, the Florida Wildlife Corridor helped frame the broader opportunity to develop a new conservation framework in the Southeast, rooted in locally led conservation and existing regional priorities. The concept of connected landscapes also aligns with the broader SERPPAS emphasis on identifying where partner priorities overlap and using data-rich, GIS-based tools to support better regional planning.
NRI’s role in supporting regional conservation partnerships
NRI’s participation in the 2026 Principals Meeting reflects its long-standing role in supporting regional conservation partnerships that connect defense readiness with natural resource stewardship. Through its work with SERPPAS and related initiatives, NRI helps convene partners, facilitate strategic conversations, translate complex issues into actionable frameworks and support the collaborative infrastructure needed to move from shared priorities to shared progress.
At this year’s meeting, that role was evident throughout the agenda. NRI staff helped facilitate the meeting process, support SERPPAS coordination and moderate key conversations about the partnership’s history and future direction. Their involvement reflects the institute’s broader commitment to applied partnership work that strengthens decision-making across agencies, sectors and landscapes.
A partnership built for the next set of questions
The 2026 SERPPAS Principals Meeting demonstrated the continued relevance of a regional partnership model built to bring complex issues and needs together rather than treat them in isolation. The agenda moved deliberately from history to strategy, from place-based examples to emerging regional challenges and from partnership reflection to practical questions about the path ahead. That structure mirrored the work SERPPAS is being asked to do: to honor the foundation that has made the partnership effective while remaining responsive to the evolving needs of maintaining military readiness, natural resource management and working lands and communities in the Southeast.
As SERPPAS enters its next chapter, the Principals Meeting affirmed that its strength remains in the place it began, where leaders are willing to stay at the table, work across institutional boundaries, and seek durable solutions where missions intersect.
