Rhode Island Has Voluntary Wildlife Fund, But It Doesn’t Have Much Dough

Nickel and diming isn't good enough

By Colleen Cronin / ecoRI News staff

Turtles at Trustom Pond. Photo by Will Collette

If you are a taxpayer in Rhode Island, you may have noticed after filling in your income and credits that the state allows you to donate to a few different causes.

On the forms for last year’s filing, a torch symbol marks where filers can make a contribution to the Olympics, a heart signals the place for a donation to the state organ transplant fund, and a paint brush sits next to the boxes for a gift to the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.

The third category from the bottom shows a little black and white fish, streams of waves coming from its tail, and contributions ticked off there are for the “Nongame Wildlife Fund.”

Created by a 1986 law, the voluntary program funds “non-game wildlife” research and management, to supplement other funding the state uses for those species, which includes invertebrates, insects, and other creatures not already supported by the large federal programs that help conserve mammals, birds, and finned fish.

The voluntary fund doesn’t draw in much money. For fiscal 2024, contributions totaled $15,095 from 1,840 taxpayers, according to the Rhode Island Department of Revenue.

It’s gone toward researching and monitoring amphibians, reptiles, and pollinators, among other things.

“This is a very small amount” compared to the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s total budget of $143.7 million in fiscal 2025, DEM spokesperson Evan LaCross told ecoRI News via email.

Zooming in on the funding earmarked for wildlife, it still isn’t much. Overall, funding for non-game wildlife in Rhode Island is dwarfed by game wildlife funding.

Between federal and state funding, DEM’s budget includes less than a million dollars total for non-game species, compared to nearly $13 million from federal wildlife and sports fishing restoration programs and state matches that supports game species, according to budget information provided by LaCross.

The bulk of the funding for non-game species in Rhode Island comes from the federal State Wildlife Grant, which totaled $590,205 last year and required a 35% match from the state.

Amanda Freitas, DEM’s Rhode Island Wildlife Action Plan community liaison, whose work is a collaborative project between the department and the Rhode Island Natural History Survey (RINHS), said she really only uses the “game” and “non-game” terminology when referring to funding.

It’s easier to describe the federal funding from the State Wildlife Grant, which supports much of her work, as some of the least restrictive of the federal funding for wildlife Rhode Island receives.

In her work, she is focused on the species of greatest concern that could benefit from conservation, which are listed in the state’s Wildlife Action Plan and include some “game” species, too.

Historically, wildlife conservation in the United States focused on species that people hunted and fished. Fees on licenses and taxes on gear for these activities contributed to funding for that type of wildlife.

In 2005, the State Wildlife Grant program began distributing money to Rhode Island.

“That was the first time that reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, in particular, could receive conservation dollars before they were in that metaphorical emergency room,” Freitas said.

Before that, those species only received funding directly if the federal government placed them on the endangered species list.

State Wildlife Grant money funds both habitat conservation and research, but it pales in comparison to the resources out there for game species.

“For the species that don’t have a hunting season or a fishing season, and a real impetus in that respect, to get a good handle on their numbers and how they’re doing … there isn’t a lot of funding necessarily, to go and find that information,” Freitas said.

For example, when scientists started to see white-nose syndrome in bats, the lack of historical data made addressing the problem a challenge.

“When we started losing bats, we didn’t really know, like, how many we started with,” she said.

With more money, and thus more research, there could be better understanding of how to do conservation work.

There have been some efforts to tax hiking gear to fund or allocate increased appropriations on the federal level for those species, but Freitas said those efforts haven’t been successful.

Although there is room for change, the current model, with emphasis on hunting and fishing species, has done a lot of good and will continue to do so, Freitas said, even positively impacting the species it isn’t directly protecting.

“It’s not exactly a problem, it’s a puzzle,” David Gregg, RINHS executive director, said. RINHS took on the state’s rare species program in 2003, cataloging which wildlife needs conservation help and where.

Gregg explained that there’s often a struggle to find matching funds or creative ways to push how much money can go to different programs because of how funding is structured or restricted.

When it comes to using game dollars to fund habitat preservation, the non-game species can often benefit, too.

Still, the funding, especially coming from the state, remains an issue, he said. “The story is that there’s not much.”