As permanent stewards of land and conservation easements, most land trusts must continually monitor and evaluate their holdings. The LTA Standards and Practices provide extensive guidance on how land trusts should best monitor the easements and properties they hold in stewardship.

The following are the key elements in an overall program of monitoring and stewardship:

• Baseline reports - initial property descriptions, including biological features
• Easement administration - ongoing requests for information, reports, etc.
• Monitoring for changes in conditions - guided by plans that define how property will be assessed over time
• Land owner relationships - the partnership with the landowner
• Community relationships - information and involvement efforts
• Easement enforcement and defense - if needed, to maintain the purposes of the easement
  

For baseline reporting and easement administration, GIS can be very useful and effective in creating accurate maps. For example, a typical property baseline map or map series will include:

• A high resolution aerial photo
  
• Parcel and easement boundaries (from tax assessor records, or surveys)
• Photo point locations (often created using GPS), indicating the compass direction of the photo image.
• Existing conditions such as roads, buildings, wells, natural water features, gates and fences, etc.
  
• Easement conditions such as building envelopes/areas, improvement areas, etc.

A local context or locator map is also usually included in baseline reports. Often a USGS quad map (a 1:24,000 DRG) with the easement and/or parcel boundary drawn on top works well to show the regional location of the easement (the commercial software Topo! can also be used to generate these maps). Or, you could create your own base map using elevation, hillshading, water features, roads, and other typical base map features.

Additional baseline report maps might include:

• Soils (data from the U.S. NRCS)    
• Geology (from the USGS)
• Adjacent protected lands or other properties
• Threatened or endangered species (see your state biodiversity coordinator, or local Nature Conservancy office)
• Vegetation (usually from state government sources, but may not be highly accurate for a particular site)

Case Example – The Sequoia Riverlands Trust

In 2003, the Sequoia Riverlands Trust and GreenInfo Network set out on the task of converting the land trust’s conservation easement baseline document maps into GIS. The first step was to track down aerial imagery and parcel data for the easement areas, followed by typical base map data. The next step involved mapping the actual easement boundary. GreenInfo Network use an ArcView extension called COGO (coordinate geometry, which converts survey measurements to GIS dimensions) and the legal description from the assessor records to draw the property boundary.

Initially, photo point locations and existing feature were either drawn onto aerial photos, parcel maps or described based on other known landmarks or coordinates. These were then digitized into the GIS. Now, the land trust’s land stewards use GPS units to define the features and then send the text or database files from the GPS to GreenInfo Network, where they are easily brought into GIS format. Along with the baseline map, a local context map is also included in the report, showing other easements in to the vicinity as well as public lands, cities, major roads, water features and other landmarks.

MORE INFO:

Land Steward monitoring software - integrated data management approach, not including GIS

LEARN MORE about GPS...

Preserving Family Lands – includes useful stewardship information