NASA conveyed a 105-acre parcel called Area 400 to the US Fish and Wildlife Service on July 7, 2026, in a ceremonial transfer near its Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The land is now part of the Patuxent Research Refuge, a 13,000-acre federal preserve established in 1936 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The refuge is distinctive in American conservation: it is the only US wildlife refuge created explicitly for scientific study.

NASA's announcement used the informal name "Hundred Acre Wood" for the tract—a whimsical reference to A.A. Milne's fictional forest, and a reflection of the acreage's initial estimate of roughly 100 acres before the more precise 105-acre figure was confirmed at the ceremony. Jamie Dunn, NASA Goddard's center director, participated in the handoff. Both agencies marked the occasion by holding a US 250th anniversary pennant, linking the transfer symbolically to the country's semiquincentennial.

The path to this agreement stretches back years. The US Fish and Wildlife Service began discussions with NASA about acquiring Area 400 in 2021, following the parcel's identification as a candidate for disposal in Goddard's 2022 campus master plan. That master plan described the site as roughly 100 acres of undeveloped woodland.

The master plan's designation of Area 400 for potential sale sparked public concern well before any formal agreement took shape. Environmental advocates warned in 2022 that selling the land to a private developer, rather than transferring it to the refuge system, could fracture habitat that is contiguous—or directly connected—with Patuxent's existing boundaries. The Washington Post published an opinion piece in January 2022 arguing that NASA's forestland should be incorporated into the refuge. Weeks later, the Bay Journal reported that Patuxent's refuge manager, Jennifer Greiner, acknowledged that the Fish and Wildlife Service lacked sufficient funding to purchase the land outright, leaving the parcel's future uncertain and dependent on cooperation between federal agencies rather than a simple market transaction.

The final resolution—a costless transfer between federal agencies rather than a sale—overcame the budget constraint that Greiner had flagged. It also avoided the scenario that conservation advocates had specifically feared: disposal to a private developer.

Area 400's industrial history is relevant to understanding the terms of this transfer. NASA environmental documents identify a chemical leachfield at the site's Propulsion Research Facility, in continuous use since 1964, and the Bi-Propellant Test Facility also operates within Area 400's boundaries. Federal land transfers involving decades of propellant testing and chemical waste infrastructure typically require environmental remediation review and interagency agreement on residual contamination liability before the deed changes hands—a process consistent with the five-year interval between the 2021 initial discussions and the 2026 ceremony, though neither agency has publicly detailed the specific remediation steps completed during that period.

For NASA Goddard, the transfer releases a parcel that the 2022 master plan had flagged as nonessential to active mission infrastructure. For USFWS, it consolidates contiguous forest canopy adjoining a refuge whose scientific mandate depends on unbroken habitat corridors—the sort of incremental land consolidation that rarely generates attention but carries disproportionate weight for the long-term ecological health of the site.

The broader context here is worth noting. NASA has held real estate for decades that predates the agency's own existence, inherited through geography and legacy testing use rather than current operational need. This kind of quiet, procedural land divestment is likely to recur across other NASA centers as the agency reassesses Cold War-era facilities against present-day mission requirements. In this author's view, the more significant precedent is not the acreage itself but the fact that a federal-to-federal transfer proved capable of resolving a contested-use question that a straightforward sale—given USFWS's funding limitations—could not have resolved.