In 2010, the Shield-Ayres Foundation approved a three-year grant to Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to help establish the Lesser Prairie-Chicken Habitat Exchange. The exchange is a new approach to mitigation and conservation that offers sustained financial incentives to landowners for conserving prairie-chicken habitat, even as responsible energy development moves forward. In 2014, the Foundation renewed its support with an additional three-year grant to take the program to scale and build momentum toward EDF’s goal of preserving 1.8 million acres of habitat in the U.S. by 2020.