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In This Issue
New Resources Page
General Easement Information
The NCED web site now has a Resources Page for Conservation Easements. It contains general information and links to access additional information on conservation easements as well as information on public access and conservation easement and peer-reviewed literature. If you have written a peer-reviewed paper that uses NCED data and would like us to link to it, please email MaryBruce.Alford@tpl.org

NCED Completeness
How Complete is NCED?
Knowing how complete a dataset is can be very important information when using data. While it's not always easy to determine those things you don't know, we have provided estimates of the completeness of NCED at the Completeness Page using the Land Trust Alliance Census and our data collection efforts.

Webinar in November
November 14
10:00 AM PST
Reserve your seat now.

Planning tools to address current and future land conservation are increasingly available, but the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) is the first and only resource providing an up-to-date picture of land in the U.S. under conservation easement. This public-private partnership brings together national conservation groups, local and regional land trusts, and state and federal agencies around a common objective. Mary Bruce Alford, from the Trust for Public Land, will introduce NCED, discuss how the database is being used and what others can do to improve upon the work already completed.



 
October, 1 2013
Greetings,

Welcome to the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) newsletter. We will be publishing the newsletter to keep you updated regarding any version releases, progress of NCED, and how it is being used by interested parties across the country. If you would prefer not to receive these newsletters, please see the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the newsletter. We welcome comments and suggestions regarding this newsletter and NCED in general. If you have used NCED in your work please let us know. Send comments and stories to MaryBruce.Alford@tpl.org.

 

The NCED Team

 

Updated NCED Now Available
June 2013 Corrections

With every release of NCED we always get great feedback from the easement community on minor (and sometimes major) corrections to the database. We are striving to make NCED as accurate and complete as possible, but we need your help to get it right! Therefore, we are releasing a new version of NCED with all of the corrections from the June 2013 update. We plan to release an update of NCED every June with corrections published in September. Please keep sending in corrections and comments as we work towards making NCED as accurate and complete as possible. "Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything." -- Wyatt Earp

 

To view and download the newest version of NCED, click HERE.

Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Easements in NCED

149 Easements in NCED and More to Come  

Until recently, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had no geospatial data for acquired conservation easements. At the suggestion of The Trust for Public Land in early 2012 the BLM began collecting data related to conservation easements, with the intention of creating a digital geospatial (GIS) data layer to use internally and to share with NCED. According to David Beaver, BLM's National Land and Water Conservation Fund Program Manager, BLM  recognized the importance of contributing to NCED because "this provides a perpetual repository and digital catalog of conservation easements acquired by the BLM, for both internal use and for use by the conservation community. Recording this data in GIS helps illustrate how these easements contribute to BLM's land conservation and resource protection mission." The first step in this process was for BLM Washington Office staff to generate a report from the BLM's land records database (Land & Mineral Legacy Rehost 2000 System) which showed the total number of conservation easements acquired, their unique serial number, and the state in which they were located. In order to pursue this collection the task was divided into pre and post 1995 collections. This workload has been led by Brian Mueller, a BLM GIS Specialist. A total of 149 pre-1995 acquired conservation easements were identified, covering approximately 88,000 acres across 11 western states.  

 

With this list in hand, Brian expected that each BLM State Office could provide a digital representation of their respective conservation easements. Once he received this information, the process to synthesize disparate data sets into a national version and populate required attributes would have appeared to be fairly simple. Unfortunately, Brian discovered that no such digital data existed in any of the BLM State Offices, and the only records available were a mixture of legal descriptions found in deeds and surveying notes, as well as sketches on survey plats, BLM master title plats, and/or USGS topographic maps.

 

Unclear as to whether this project would be feasible, Brian decided to use Utah and Wyoming as pilot states. Each easement was created in GIS from scratch, using the established NCED GIS framework. The approach was successful and the methodology was repeated for easements in the remaining states. The entire process took approximately one year. In March of 2013, the BLM submitted a geospatial data layer of 149 post-1995 conservation easements to the NCED.

  

However, the work isn't complete yet. The BLM is in the early stages of collecting pre-1995 conservation easement data. Initially, the BLM is focusing on the conservation easements obtained on Oregon's Rogue National Wild and Scenic River during the 1970's and 1980's. Reports generated from LR2000 indicate that there are possibly over 250 conservation easements in this area alone, representing a majority of the pre-1995 easements.


We at NCED look forward to receiving the BLM's remaining data and are excited by their commitment to build a more complete and robust conservation easement database.

If you have not yet shared information on Conservation Easements your organization holds please
contact us soon!

Sincerely,
 
The NCED Team

The National Conservation Easement Database | http://www.conservationeasement.us

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