When Janet Silbernagel grew up playing along the banks of the Sugar River near the town of Riley, she never imagined she was following in the footsteps of a famous naturalist.

“I explored the woods and built bridges across the river,” says Silbernagel, now an associate professor of landscape architecture. “I appreciated it, but I didn’t have any idea of the landscape’s history.”

It was only years later, after she joined the UW-Madison faculty, that Silbernagel learned her childhood home – one of a collection of farms that dot the hilly terrain southwest of Madison – had once been a laboratory for Aldo Leopold, whose writings have made him a cherished figure in Wisconsin’s environmental history. While a professor of wildlife ecology at UW-Madison, Leopold forged a unique arrangement in Riley with local landowners that allowed him to try out his theories about game management – as well as hunt a few birds.

Though not as well-recognized as places such as Leopold’s “Sand County” or the Arboretum, the Riley landscape is just as much a part of the hallowed geography of Leopold’s Wisconsin. His work there began in 1931 – four years before he began renovating his property along the Wisconsin River – when he struck up a conversation with a local farmer while looking for a place to hunt pheasants. Soon thereafter, Leopold organized the Riley Game Cooperative, in which local farmers agreed to maintain the marshy lands along the Sugar River as a wildlife habitat and hunting preserve. Eventually including 11 farms and some 1,700 acres, the cooperative survived until after Leopold’s death in 1948. Leopold penned a journal article about the cooperative in 1940, and it came to influence his ideas about managing private lands to support native populations of wildlife.

“It represented a unique partnership between town and country to cooperatively manage a landscape,” says Silbernagel. “It’s an example of a different aspect of Leopold’s work, which is what makes it exciting as a place for environmental education.”

Since learning about the Leopold connection in 2002, Silbernagel has worked to raise awareness of the landscape’s history, which she hopes will spark efforts to preserve it. Just 14 miles from Madison, Riley faces encroaching sprawl from Madison and its fast-growing suburbs, and land prices have recently been trending upward.

“I would say it’s a semi-threatened landscape,” says Riley landowner Bill Weber Sr., one of the founding members of First Weber Group Realtors, who owns one of the farms in the original cooperative. “Right now, it’s easier to think about conservation from an economic standpoint than it will be when we’ve got more development pressure.”

Because of these factors, the Riley area has been identified as a priority in Dane County’s most recent parks and open space plan. The Natural Heritage Land Trust, a Wisconsin-based conservation group, has also done work in the area to encourage landowners to adopt conservation practices.

As both an expert in conservation planning and a Riley native, Silbernagel is a natural choice to help shepherd these efforts. Though intensive agriculture has waned in the region and many landowners now enroll property in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, Silbernagel believes Riley can meet its conservation goals by reviving Leopold’s cooperative spirit.

“I envision some sort of revival of the cooperative community in a modernized form,” she says. “It would be rural landowners who are interested in the landscape and conservation working together with the larger community to continue the legacy and make it a great learning experience.”