Land
Protected
Tops 150,000 Acres
In 2006 the Alabama Land Trust, Inc. and the Georgia Land Trust,
Inc. drafted a strategic plan that included the ambitious goal of
protecting 125,000 acres of land by the end of 2011. The goal seemed
optimistic, but there was reason to believe it could be done.
From our beginnings in 1993 until 2000 we had recorded less than
2,000 acres in easements. We gathered momentum after that. By 2005,
we had helped protect a touch over 40,000 acres, bolstered
significantly by nearly 20,000 acres protected in 2004 and another
15,000 in 2005. If we maintained the pace set in those two years, we
would make our goal.
As it turned out, our annual rate of land protection climbed to
around 28,000 acres a year from 2006-2009. The average per year was
boosted significantly by over 38,000 acres protected in 2009 alone.
As a result, by the end of 2009 we topped 150,000 acres protected,
more than 25,000 acres beyond our plan’s 2011 goal.
In achieving this milestone, we helped protect:
• Open space for recreational use or education of the general
public;
• Productive soils. Our easements work to safeguard the productive
uses of conserved lands. We map productive soils in our
pre-conveyance documentation to assist ongoing stewardship and
management of croplands and timberlands. A single southwest Georgia
easement preserved 8,500 acres, of which roughly 85% was rated by
the National Resource Conservation Service as Prime Soils or Soils
of Statewide Importance
• Relatively natural habitat. We preserve to the greatest extent
possible Special Natural Areas within protected properties.
Sometimes this entails a simple widening of mandated buffers along
streams or an elevated basal area to be maintained when
silvicultural harvesting is undertaken; sometimes it is an outright
commitment to preserving these areas intact, allowing only for
peaceful enjoyment and stewardship for the benefit of the protected
habitat.
• Water quality. We continued protection efforts that have conserved
many miles of streamside buffers, riparian corridors and drainage
areas in virtually every major watershed in Alabama and Georgia.
So, having advanced critical elements of our core mission and having
rocketed right past our most recent quantifiable land protection
goal, we are now looking at how to gauge our success in the
near-term future. Success at this scale creates a number of exciting
new situations :
• Providing ongoing stewardship for protected properties, including
visiting properties at least annually. With over 400 easements
spanning over 500 miles, this is a particular challenge. We are
making greater use of aerial monitoring this year in an effort to
create greater efficiencies of scale and to provide the larger view
necessitated by the scale of many of our easements (Thirty of our
easements are over 1000 acres and more than 300 are greater than 250
acres.)
• Continuing to maintain, recruit and train the caliber of staff
required to undertake all the components of our mission: donor
development; conservation values research and documentation; field
documentation; drafting and legal review of due diligence documents;
monitoring; stewardship; and administration. As we go to press, we
have seventeen staff members.
• Refining our service delivery and Standard Operating Procedures to
continue operating at the highest levels of land trust standards.
• Paying for all of this.
In addition to our record year of land protection, we had a very
good year in terms of fund raising and in contributions to our
stewardship endowment. This is in part due to the generosity of our
many supporters and this moment of celebrating a significant
achievement is a very good time to offer our thanks to all of you
who help make our ongoing success possible.
We look forward to continuing our progress in the future. We look
forward to working with you and hope we can continue to count on
your support in the future.
