About the Nation Conservation Easement Database
The National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) is the first national database of conservation easement information, compiling records from land trusts and public agencies throughout the United States. This public-private partnership brings together national conservation groups, local and regional land trusts, and state and federal agencies around a common objective. Currently, no single, nationwide system exists for sharing and managing information about conservation easements, making it diffucult to have a good understanding of our conservation footprint. This effort helps agencies, land trusts, and other organizations 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.
Who?
NCED is an initiative of the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities. Additional financial support has been provided by the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; the Knobloch Family Foundation; the Graham Foundation; the U.S. Forest Service, State and Private Forestry; and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC). These supporters enable the NCED team to move forward with developing the NCED database. The NCED team consists of five leading conservation organizations, including: Conservation Biology Institute, Defenders of Wildlife, Ducks Unlimited, NatureServe, and The Trust for Public Land. Three federal agencies - the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the U.S. Forest Service - are sponsors of the effort and are partnering with the Endowment in support of the national database. Other key sponsors include The Nature Conservancy and the Land Trust Alliance.
Methods
In the first phase of the NCED project, four of the five partners actively collected data from agencies and land trusts, with each assigned to a specific set of states. Currently, The Trust for Public Land is responsible for the public easement data collection and Ducks Unlimited is responsible for the private easement data collection. The database does not contain any identifying information about landowners. Only publicly available information from land records and basic statistics is included, such as the easement boundary, purpose and holder. In addition, for special instances in which a land trust requests concealing the exact location of an easement, we do not display the location on the map and will withhold the location from downloads. For these easements, all other descriptive information is available for data reports, along with information on all the other easements, through the primary web site - the National Conservation Easement Portal.