Have you digitized new or older easements? Made updates to data previously submitted to NCED? If you've completed any of this work since this past June, please submit to NCED soon! We would like to collect new data by April 15th in order to publish during our scheduled release this coming June.  

For publicly held easements contact The Trust for Public Land. For privately held easements contact Ducks Unlimited.

Through a generous grant provided by the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation, the NCED team is able to begin work contacting all land trusts and select municipalities for updated easement information in Connecticut. UCONN is digitizing all easements associated with the states' open space program (about 400 easements) and this new data will be shared with NCED. We look forward to making the database in Connecticut more complete!

Over the last six months we have worked to secure new funding to support the continued development of NCED. We have also incorporated new data from organizations across the country. Two significant data collection efforts are underway in New Jersey and Connecticut, both of which are featured in this issue. If you are interested in learning of ways NCED is being utilized in the field take, please take a look at the use case also featured.

Our next release is scheduled for June and we look forward to receiving updates on easements your organization holds.  

Stay in touch regarding ways you've found NCED to be helpful in your work. 

The NCED Team

We have learned of many ways in which the National Conservation Easement Database is being used across the country. In Kentucky, it has been an invaluable tool for advancing funding for conservation in the state and helping to develop a state climate change response strategy.

Conservation Funding

A statewide coalition - Conserve Kentucky - formed in 2010 to increase awareness of the importance of Kentucky's lands and waters, and help coordinate legislative and conservation efforts. This group hopes to foster innovative collaboration between the public and private sectors.

One of the informational or educational pieces produced by the coalition is a map that quantifies the current state of conservation lands. NCED, PAD-US and other state government spatial databases were compiled to create a map and statistics on these lands. It was determined that Kentucky has approximately seven percent of land classified as protected. These areas vary widely in the management objectives and whether they are permanent or temporary. Further assessments were completed to compare Kentucky's level of protection to the seven surrounding states. This analysis highlighted that Kentucky has the lowest percentage of protection, which will help the coalition as it continues to make its case for continued land conservation in the state.

Climate Change Response

NCED is also being used by a group of state and federal agencies, conservation organizations and citizens who are working to develop a climate change response plan for Kentucky. One aspect of the plan will be to develop conservation priorities using cumulative knowledge of the group and looking at the current matrix of conservation lands. NCED will be a key tool in making this assessment. The group intends to distribute the action plan to legislators, federal, state and local governments, nonprofits organizations and the general public.

If you have used NCED recently to advance your work, please share your story with us!

Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation & USGS Support Data Collection in New Jersey    

New Jersey has been a leader in land conservation since the early 1960s through the passage of numerous state bond issues and a constitutional amendment in 1998 to fund the Garden State Preservation Trust Fund. Although voters in the state have approved over $4.5 billion dollars for land conservation - with a significant portion helping to purchase conservation easements - there is no comprehensive database tracking these acquisitions over time. To address this gap in information the NCED team, the New Jersey Office of GIS, and the Department of Environmental Protection have developed an exciting partnership to collect and map data on protected lands (fee and easement). The New Jersey Office of GIS will build a Preserved Lands/Open Space (PLOS) database and the underlying technologies necessary to manage and host the database. The Green Acres Program will manage, maintain and update data going forward, ensuring that all data will be available publicly via an online portal, and will be gathered and processed to feed into national databases such as the Protected Areas Database of the US (PAD-US), the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED), and The Trust for Public Land's Conservation Almanac.

This work is made possible through funding by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and U.S. Geological Survey. The first round of data collection is complete, having contacted all counties and all land trusts. The state is currently compiling Green Acres and Farmland data. In our next round of data collection - to begin soon - we will reach out to all municipalities with an open space tax.   

Though the PLOS database is still likely a year away from launch, it is an important endeavor for the conservation community in New Jersey and a national example of how states can work with NCED to build a comprehensive protected lands database. We will present PLOS at the NJ LTA Rally in March and hope you will join us if you plan to be there!