Land Trust Alliance Blog: Taking Responsibility

This blog caught my eye because we are also in the process of re-accreditation. Bur Oak Land Trust’s board has adopted the new Land Trust Standards and Practices and we are excited to find out what the changes — especially in technology — will mean for Bur Oak Land Trust’s monitoring and maintenance of properties. Here’s Maryland Environmental Trust’s blog: Taking Responsibility:

As one of the oldest land trusts in the country, the Maryland Environmental Trust holds more than 1,100 conservation easements statewide. As you can imagine, with that many easements, our monitoring and stewardship responsibilities are considerable. We rely heavily on volunteers to help us monitor the many properties that we have been involved in preserving.

When our board of directors met to review the recently released Land Trust Standards and Practices — revised after a long input process to incorporate the experiences of diverse land trusts from around the country — we were pleased to find that the 2017 Standards reflect the latest changes in technology.

For instance, we now will be able to ensure the integrity of our conservation easements in part through aerial monitoring, using satellite imagery to annually monitor changes in protected properties. As a result, we will only need to go on the ground to monitor every five years instead of every year — a major time saver.

Land trust members of the Alliance are required over the next year to adopt the revised Standards through a board resolution — affirming the guidelines in principle and committing to steady progress in putting them into effect. We decided to take an early look at them. We feel that it is important for land trusts as a community to all come together and do this as soon as possible.

To familiarize ourselves with the new Standards, our accreditation subcommittee met to discuss them and if and how they differed from the previous Standards. Then we did a quick determination as to where we are as a land trust in adhering to the guidelines, which describe how to operate a land trust legally, ethically and in the public interest, with a sound program of land transactions and land stewardship.

I hope my fellow leaders in the land trust community will take responsibility to make sure your boards review the new Standards. Our board unanimously adopted them as our guiding principles and was proud to do so.