The US doesn't have one conservation sector, it has fifty overlapping ones. A land trust in Vermont and a native plant society in Arizona have almost nothing to do with each other, work in completely different landscapes, and will never appear in the same search result, even though they're both doing exactly the kind of work someone might be looking for.

That's the real problem with finding US conservation organisations. It isn't that information doesn't exist, it's that it's scattered across fifty states, each with its own state wildlife federation, its own rivers alliances, its own land trusts tied to a specific county or watershed. Search for "conservation organizations" and you get the national names: The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, WWF, Audubon. Search for anything more specific and you need to already know which state to search in, and often which town.

Researching state by state

So that's how we built it. Instead of searching nationally and stopping at whatever surfaced, we went through the country one state at a time: land trusts, watershed and rivers groups, state wildlife federations, native plant societies, marine and species specific charities, alongside the national organisations everyone already knows. The finished directory is listed alphabetically by organisation name, not by state, so everything sits in one A to Z list rather than fifty separate ones.

That state by state research turns up a different kind of organisation to the ones a general search finds. A rivers alliance working one specific watershed. A state wildlife federation nobody outside that state has heard of. A land trust protecting a few thousand acres in one county. None of these show up when you search "US conservation groups", but all of them are exactly what someone working on a specific project, in a specific place, actually needs.

What's in the directory

Every organisation is listed alphabetically, with a short note on what it does and a link to its website. It's not ranked, and a five person land trust sits next to a national institution with the same weight. It's the fullest map we could build of who's working on conservation, and where.

Where it's useful

• Working on a specific place. Find the state or local organisation already active where your project is, instead of starting from national names with no presence there.
• Job hunting. See the full range of employers, not just the ones large enough to dominate search results.
• Partnerships and funding. Match a project to the organisation with the right specialism and location, rather than the one you'd already heard of.
• Cross border comparison. Set alongside the UK directory, it's a way to see how conservation organisations are structured differently between countries.

It will keep changing

Fifty states of research means fifty separate sets of organisations to keep current, and organisations merge, rename, close and start up constantly. We would rather this stayed accurate than stayed still, so if you know of one that's missing, or one that needs updating, we would like to hear about it.

See the full directory: https://training.wildteam.org.uk/blog/a-to-z-of-us-conservation-organisations

Know an organisation that's missing? Add it here: https://forms.gle/RocYJJCtjURfJCyp6