Seeds of Restoration Success by Sara F. Oldfield & Peggy Olwell & Nancy Shaw & Kayri Havens

Author:Sara F. Oldfield & Peggy Olwell & Nancy Shaw & Kayri Havens
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319969749
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Land trusts provide an important mechanism for conservation of private lands, either by ownership or by negotiating conservation easements. Ownership of reserves by land trusts requires management of natural resources and monitoring of progress toward stated management objectives (Peters et al. 2017). A conservation easement is a legally-binding agreement between a property owner and a nonprofit organization, usually a land trust, or a government agency that restricts development on an area of land, usually in exchange for tax benefits for the property owner (Gattuso 2008). Various types of private land use, such as farming , ranching and timber harvesting, can continue under the terms of a conservation easement, and owners may continue to live on the property. The organization to receive or buy the easement, known as the grantee, holds interest in the property and enforces the restrictions. Most conservation easements are binding in perpetuity.

Land trusts in the U.S. currently manage over 56 million acres (22.7 million ha) of land (Chang 2016). The land trust movement began in 1891 in the State of Massachusetts with the first private land trust, the Trustees of Reservations in Massachusetts. This was formed to purchase and maintain public parkways, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, throughout the city of Boston. Conservation easements were next used in the 1930s and 1940s, when the NPS bought parcels of land for scenic use along what are now the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Natchez Trace Parkway. Massachusetts, with 143 land trusts, is still the nation's leading state for land trust management.

Four national land trusts are The Nature Conservancy Trust, Trust for Public Land, American Farmland Trust, and Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. Most of the Nature Conservancy’s easement transactions have been donated with the Conservancy also purchasing some easements in high priority sites. Purchasing easements is less expensive than purchasing the land itself. The Nature Conservancy also supports purchase-of-development rights (PDRs) programs . These are a form of conservation easement whereby public funds are used to purchase the land’s development rights, in effect creating a conservation easement on the land while the land remains in private ownership.

Increasingly, states and communities are using financing mechanisms for PDR programs such as annual appropriations, dedicated lottery revenues , and bonds authorized by the legislature or a voter referendum.

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