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President Barack Obama authorized the expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Southern Oregon. The move announced Thursday, Jan. 12, 2017, adds about 48,000 acres to a landscape of rich forests, grasslands and shrubs.

(Bureau of Land Management)

ASHLAND -- President Barack Obama has expanded the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southwestern Oregon to protect its rich biodiversity.

He also designed three new national monuments to recognize the nation's journey from the Civil War to the modern Civil Rights Movement, and expanded the California Coastal National Monument to protect natural and cultural resources.

The Cascade-Siskiyou expansion adds about 48,000 acres to a landscape of rich forests, grasslands and shrubs that was established as a monument in 2000. It includes about 5,000 acres in northern California.

Obama said in his proclamation that the expansion will create a landscape that will connect vital habitat, protect the watershed and preserve the area's extraordinary biodiversity. The monument, originally 65,000 acres, is home to rare plant and animal species.

Conservation groups and Oregon's Democratic U.S. senators praised the decision.

Oregon Public Broadcasting says detractors have expressed concern that a larger monument would hurt the region's economy with limits on logging and grazing. The Oregon Cattleman's Association said in a news release that the decision will have a rippling effect on ranchers, farmers and outdoor enthusiasts.

Also Thursday, Obama signed an order designating an historic civil rights district in Alabama as a national monument, placing several blocks of a city once rocked by racial violence on par with landmarks including the Grand Canyon.

The National Park Service will now have oversight of a downtown section of Birmingham, Alabama -- a focal point of civil rights struggles in 1963 against harsh enforcement of laws mandating racial segregation.

Obama, who leaves office next week, acted after Congress failed to approve legislation proposed to bring the several-block area into the federal park system.

"It is such a great tribute to the people of the city of Birmingham that President Obama would make this designation as one of his last actions before leaving the White House," said Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, who sponsored the legislation.

Agency employees will now be based in the district, which also becomes eligible for federal funding. The Park Service separately announced grants totaling more than $500,000 benefit the area, part of $7.5 million in funding for civil rights sites nationwide.

The Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument will include the now-abandoned A.G. Gaston Motel, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. planned weeks of demonstrations against segregation in the spring of 1963; the park where black protesters were met by police dogs and fire hoses; the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four black girls died in a Ku Klux Klan bombing that year; and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

It also includes a business district that was a hub of black commerce for generations.

Obama also designated two other new national monuments linked to equal rights.

The new Freedom Riders National Monument in the east Alabama city of Anniston will include the Greyhound bus station where a racially integrated bus of activists was attacked in 1961. The Reconstruction Era National Monument in Beaufort County, South Carolina, will tell the story of a community built by freed slaves after the Civil War.

Stephanie K. Meeks, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said the proclamation means Birmingham's civil rights district will "join the ranks of national monuments and parks across the country that reflect seminal turning points in our history."

"These new national monuments provide a place for reflection on how far we've come and how far we still have to go to achieve true equality for all," she said in a statement.

The city-owned Civil Rights Institute and park already draw thousands of visitors annually, and 16th Street Baptist is both a civil rights landmark and the home of an active congregation.

Local leaders and tourism officials hope that even more visitors will show up once the site has National Park Service employees to greet visitors and explain the sites.

The most visible changes will occur at the now-ramshackle motel where King met with aides in an upstairs suite called the "war room" during pivotal demonstrations that resulted in Birmingham police and firefighters trying to stop marchers with dogs and high-pressure water hoses. King himself was arrested and wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" while in the city in April 1963.

- The Associated Press