National Conservation Easement Database Goes Live!

When the Colorado legislature proposed in 2010 a cut in the tax benefits afforded to landowners looking to offer conservation easements on thier properties, local conservation organizations knew they needed to act fast.  To create an economic foundation for conservation easements, the organizations set out to quantify the financial benefits of the environmental services provided by such easements.  While accepted estimates existed for the economic benefit of various habitats spread across Colorado’s 1.4 million acres currently under conservation easements, the tricky question was how to quickly calculate the total benefit across the state.


A Tool to Support Sound PlanningEnter the National Conservation Easement Database.  With a quick search, economists with the Trust for Public Lands were able to quantify land areas and in turn calculate the total economic contribution of those lands through environmental services.  The total: $3.51 million in public benefits—clean air and water, habitat and wildlife protection, and open space representing a $6 to $1 return on investments made to conserve land, some of which came in the form of state tax credits.

NCED Uses Modern Technology to Advance Cause and Accountability
This result would not have been possible if not for the newly-released National Conservation Easement Database (NCED).  The database, conceived of and funded by the Endowment, represents collaboration between five national conservation organizations in an effort to create a central location for up-to-date data regarding our nation’s conservation easements.  While knowledge of easement size, location, and purpose was rarely available even at the state-level, NCED allows a user full access to a national database of conservation easement data, including spatial maps and GIS overlays.

The Value of Accurate Information
Accessibility of this information has implications spanning conservation, policy, and land management, and will lead agencies, land trusts, and other organizations to plan more strategically, identify opportunities for collaboration, advance public accountability, and raise the profile of what’s happening on-the-ground in the name of conservation.  Of NCED, Endowment President Carlton Owen says, “While we know where public lands are, without comparable information on those lands subject to conservation easements, conservation planners—whether they be from the public or private sectors—are operating without all of the pieces of the puzzle.  Such is like driving blind; it can be done, but it doesn’t offer much potential for getting to the desired location by the best route.”

Building the database involved the collection of physical attributes of individual easements—such as State, County, easement holder, easement purpose, size in acres, and year acquired—creating a multi-layered GIS dataset, searchable by categories.

Screen capture of easement data in Orange County, NC.

As of August 1, 2011, the database has compiled data on 80,756 individual conservation easements, representing nearly 18 millions acres of land.  NCED contributors estimate this to be approximately 60% of all easements in the country.  Easement holders and land trusts can easily add their own land data on the highly interactive website, http://nced.conservationregistry.org/.

Cameron Tommey
Endowment Special Projects Intern