Land Trusts Page 5
(ECP and CTSP grantees, reports, and other sites of interest for
conservation geography, mapping and GIS. Grantees are coded by
program and year of grant at the end of their name/state, i.e. e91 means
ECP grant in 1991. c=cstp, cm=ctsp-mac, cs=ctsp-software)
Sonoma Land Trust, Ca c98. (1122 Sonoma Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA 95405 tel: 707-526-6930
fax: 707-526-3001 Email: slt@sonic.net GIS contact: Thomas Baginski)
"Sonoma Land Trust (SLT), founded in 1976, has protected more than 10,000
acres of baylands, wetlands, redwoods, oak chaparral, urban separators, and
agricultural lands in Sonoma County, CA. We are the oldest and largest
non-profit conservation organization based in Sonoma County with 1200
active members and scores of volunteers. As a land trust, most of our
activities involve some mapping component. More specifically, the GIS grant
will be used to accomplish three major tasks during the initial year of
the grant period. These specific tasks are: completing the Sonoma County
Coastal Parcel Study, updating the monitoring database for SLT's land
holdings, and preparing presentation material for new conservation projects.
The immediate use of GIS will be for the Sonoma Land Trust Coastal
Area Parcel Study (CAPS). The CAPS will determine the feasibility of acquiring,
through fee or easement, lands of scenic and conservation value between
Bodega Bay and Stewarts Point along the Sonoma County coast. The project
will involve extensive mapping and analysis of land parcels, wildlife
habitat, wetlands, conservation value, zoning and other layers for the
region. The long term use of will be to update the mapping, analysis,
and management capabilities of the Sonoma Land Trust for all of our projects
and properties."
South Kingstown Land Trust, Ri, c99. (66 Main Street Unit 3, Wakefield, Rhode
Island 02879 USA tel:401-789-0962 fax:401-789-5816 GIS contact: Joanne
Riccitelli email:sklt@ids.net)
"The South Kingstown Land Trust was established in 1983 as a private,
nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the natural, scenic, and historic
areas of the town of South Kingstown. To date, SKLT has succeeded in completing 63
projects, protecting 896 acres of land, through conservation easement or outright ownership.
The South Kingstown Land Trust (SKLT) has already made significant
investments in using GIS as an analytical and mapping tool, through the
expert guidance of its volunteer Board member, Dr. Peter August of the
University of Rhode Island, and has come to depend on the analytical and
cartographic products that this software can create. The challenge for
the GIS program at SKLT now is to transfer much of the responsibility
and capability for GIS work to its new Land Protection Director."
Taos Land Trust, Taos NM c97. (PO Box 376, Taos, NM 87571, tel:751-3138 Contact:
Clare C Swanger email: tlt@laplaza.org) "The Taos Land Trust (TLT)
was formed in 1988 by long-time residents intent upon preserving the
rural character, land-based culture and natural environment of the community
they love. From 1992 to mid 1997, TLT focused on preserving land via
conservation easements (CEs) and educational efforts about land preservation
and estate planning. During that time, we completed 11 CEs on 1,052
acres of important natural lands, and directly influenced preservation
of an additional 18,000 acres. This spring, through internal planning
and 50 in-depth interviews with supporters and community leaders, we
expanded our mission to include land use planning and land acquisition.
Our current mission is "To help preserve land with agricultural value,
scenic vistas, significant habitat, or historical sites through direct
preservation, conservation partnerships, education and land planning
for the benefit of the families, communities, cultures and natural systems
of the Taos region." GIS STATUS:
"Using ArcView 3.0 with the Spatial Analyst extension, we published
a map that showed the extent of the area within a 9.5-mile radius from
the municipal airport where the Town was attempting to impose its land
use authority. This simple visual tool had a powerful impact, because
it starkly showed the extent of impact on County land use planning,
in contrast to most people's notions about the size of the area involved.
The map currently hangs in the County Planning Commission's office...At
the request of supporters and community leaders, the TLT became involved
with the County's first-ever comprehensive land use planning process
by providing information and resources to assist the locally-based planning
efforts of neighborhood associations. ... The County land use plan relies
heavily on NA participation and input, yet what little public information
was available contained many inaccuracies. First, the TLT digitized
boundaries for 13 NAs based on written records and rough sketches. After
demonstrating the capabilities of our upgraded GIS, six NAs asked for
further assistance. We responded by providing a map of publicly available
road data overlain by the neighborhood boundaries that we created. NA
members manually corrected the (sometimes significant) inaccuracies
in the public information. Then the TLT worked with a NA representative
from each neighborhood to correct the digital data and create a layer
of acequias (irrigation ditches), which is important to community and
agricultural planning in this arid environment. One of the neighborhood
representatives working with the TLT even designed a protocol that other
NAs can use to correct errors in their neighborhood's data."
The Nature Conservancy,
Wash DC e90.
The Nature Conservancy is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization
dedicated to the preservation of plants, animals, and natural communities
that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands
and waters they need to survive. Acres Protected in the U.S. since 1953:
9.5 million, Acres Protected outside the U.S. with TNC Assistance: 42
million, Acres Managed: 1.3 million (acres the Conservancy owns or has
under conservation easement), Membership: 828,000, Corporate Associates:
1,385, Preserves Under Conservancy Management: 1,500, Natural Heritage
Inventory Programs and Conservation Data Centers: 86.
The Nature Conservancy's Conservation Science Programs:
Conservation Science programs encompass the biological, ecological, and technological knowledge
that we draw on to identify and protect at-risk biodiversity, as well
as the management methods and practices we employ to ensure its survival.
Selected Nature Conservancy Scientific Data Sets.
The Scientific Resource Center
is a forum for researchers and other conservation specialists to access scientific
and technical information from Conservancy science programs. The resource center
includes information derived from the Conservancy's scientific databases, documentation
about how this information is developed and managed, and guidance for where and how to
access additional information.
Natural Heritage Network:
Natural heritage programs manage standardized information
on endangered plants, animals and ecological communities. What animals,
plants and ecological communities are rare? Where do they occur? How are
they faring? See:
The Natural Heritage Methodology. Heritage
databases are regularly analyzed
by Conservancy scientists to identify which areas we should be trying to protect next, and
geographic information systems (GIS), allows us to
overlay sets of information—on an area's hydrology, vegetation cover, and land-use
patterns, for instance—to help us analyze a particular site. We are also making
great strides in assessing biodiversity protection at both multiple scales of biology
and geography—from rare species to ecosystems, and from nature preserves
to landscapes. We have moved beyond looking just inside the boundaries
of our preserves to examining the much broader landscapes in which they
are embedded. At this landscape scale, we must also address ecological
function and the influences of people. To enable us to work at these larger
scales, we are developing better conservation planning methods and tools
that will allow us to plan across immense biologically defined regions
like the Great Plains, as well as plan across the range of a particular
ecological community like the longleaf pine forests of the Southeast.
The Association for Biodiversity Information
was established to unify, support, and represent the network of Natural
Heritage Programs and Conservation Data Centres in the mission of collecting,
interpreting, and disseminating ecological information critical to the
conservation of the world's biological diversity.
GIS is an important tool in their work.
TNC Text Only State Listing.
The
Nature Conservancy Alaska, Anchorage c96. (421 W. FIRST AVENUE, SUITE
200, ANCHORAGE, AK, 99501, USA Phone: 907-276-3133 Fax: 907-276-2584
) Our overall goal is to protect landscapes of global biological significance
present in the Arctic subcontinent of Alaska. as well as those ecosystems
which represent Alaska's rich natural heritage. Alaska's rare and unique
ecosystems will be our first priority....The Conservancy was awarded a
Conservation Technology Support Grant from Hewlett-Packard, the Smithsonian
Institution, and the Environmental Systems Research Institute to develop
a geographic information system (GIS) for the Kenai River watershed. The
grant will cover computer hardware, software, and training. The Conservancy
plans to load a wide array of information on the watershed into the GIS
station. Integration of this diverse information, including land ownership,
habitat types and conditions, stream types, recreational uses, and other
geographic information, will provide a valuable consolidated database
for watershed-wide ecological analyses to use in developing conservation
priorities for the whole watershed.
The Nature Conservancy California Cosumnes River Preserve, Ca e98e.
(The Nature Conservancy, 13501 Franklin Blvd., Galt, CA 95632,
Phone: 916-683-1700; FAX 916-683-1702; Email sblanchette@cosumnes.org
GIS Contact: Valerie Calegari, vcalegari@cosumnes.org)
"The Cosumnes is a small river whose headwaters rise at only 8,000'
above sea level and whose course from the Sierra Nevada to the San Joaquin Delta
is just 80 miles long. But the Cosumnes is far more important than its size would
indicate. It is the only undammed river on the west slope of the Sierra, and in
its lower reaches it flows through one of the biologically richest regions
in California's Central Valley on its way to its confluence with the Mokelumne
River and the San Joaquin Delta. The Cosumnes River Preserve was created
to safeguard much of that landscape." See their
Online Map.
GIS STATUS: "My last grant was a scholarship to the
1998 ESRI Conference. At the conference, I met a number of people with whom
I have kept in touch, and who have helped me to develop our GIS at the Preserve.
I was inspired by a number of the posters displayed, and have used the ESRI Map
book provided as a source for layout and graphics ideas in my own maps.
The Cosumnes River Project is a multi-agency partnership which protects and
restores riparian forest, seasonal wetlands, vernal pools, and wildlife-friendly
agriculture in southern Sacramento and northern San Joaquin Counties.
The Preserve currently protects and manages 37,000 acres. We have been
working with ArcView GIS here for the past year and a half. Thanks to
the help of many of our partners, I have been able to develop a good digital
library of base maps, including DEMs, DOQs, soils maps, parcel boundaries,
waterways, floodplains, topographic maps, etc. ArcView has allowed me
to make maps and provide analysis which have been extremely useful for
determining our focus, purchasing fee and easement acquisitions...We have
also found the GIS a critical tool for expressing our successes at the
Project. With maps and tables, we have shown our partners, funders, policy
makers and other land stewards just how we are managing the Preserve for
biodiversity while supporting the local agricultural economy. The applications
of this GIS are so varied that it has become overwhelming for us to undertake
all the analysis necessary for the continued growth of this project, and
further training is needed. GIS has proven to be a reliable and powerful
tool for managing and planning a preserve of this size and diversity.
Maps and charts created with ArcView 3.1 have been used to demonstrate
to our funders and partners just how their money is being spent. For example,
by overlaying fish sampling sites on a digital ortho quad, our fish biologist
was able to analyze and demonstrate differential fish use of restored
floodplain, flooded forest, and sloughs. The results of his work have
brought considerable attention and further funding to our restoration
efforts. In another case, I offered our restoration coordinator a digital
soils map overlaid with parcel boundaries, with acreage of potential restoration
sites. This offered him a powerful tool for designing his planting regime
and saved him hours of field work measuring plot sizes."
All text by the respective organizations/authors
January 2, 1997
Web layout & design: Charles Convis, ESRI Conservation Program
April 2, 1996
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