2022 Schedule – Central Time

In this session, participants will be introduced to the 1.7 million acres of natural forested land embedded within U.S. cities. These forest patches are unique spaces in cities and provide a raft of benefits to urban residents, such as carbon sequestration and storage, stormwater capture, and air purification to provide a place that enhances mental health and social cohesion. But despite their prevalence in cities and importance, these forests are often underfunded and lack consistent management. This session will create an opportunity for conservation professionals to share knowledge and experiences across the urban-rural landscape. The session will include an exploration of land use change patterns in cities highlighting case studies of natural areas loss, and successful conservation strategies. It will also explore various fundraising and financing tactics, including several innovative funding approaches. The session will also introduce attendees to two novel management resources: an online resource library for urban forest management and an urban silviculture guide, highlighting how rural forestry practices can be applied in urban forest patches.

In the U.S., over 80% of eastern forests and grasslands as well as 80% of lands in New England are privately held, necessitating innovative partnerships between conservationists and private landowners to conserve biodiversity. The Cornell Land Trust Bird Conservation Initiative builds Conservation Collaboratives, which are strategic and coordinated partnerships that bring neighboring land trusts and partners together to focus conservation efforts on private lands where protection and management are most needed and effective by using birds as indicators of healthy habitats. One such collaborative in New England, the Northeast Bird Habitat Conservation Initiative (NBHCI), includes Regional Conservation Partnerships (RCP), which are 54 networks of private and public organizations, including land trusts, who work together to develop and implement shared, long-term conservation visions across regional boundaries. NBHCI partners meet their shared RCP and land trust objectives and ecological priorities by identifying and connecting with landowners, helping to scale efforts for at-risk birds and their associated habitats throughout the Northeast. This workshop will demonstrate how this collaborative model successfully uses eBird to assist with community engagement, stewardship, and land prioritization efforts, employs forestry practices that utilize birds as ambassadors for sustainable forest management and increased climate adaptation, and implements restorative grassland practices with management changes that balance needs of both birds and farmers. We will show how partnerships developed within such a framework as the RCP Network can lead to more collective climate resiliency across a larger landscape through these land prioritization, healthy forest, and sustainable grassland practices.

Three land trusts in the Philadelphia region address water quality in the Delaware River watershed through very different methods. As climate change threatens to make the Philadelphia area hotter and wetter, its effects, specifically flooding, erosion, sedimentation, loss of wildlife habitat, and nutrient pollution, must be addressed regionally, locally, and on individual properties. Willistown Conservation Trust’s (WCT’s) Watershed Protection Program has worked since 2017 to ensure long-term health of their local watershed through monitoring, restoration, education, and best management practices in small headwater streams. The program seeks to understand the health of the watershed and provide scientifically supported restoration recommendations for municipalities and residents. Wissahickon Trails improves the 64-square mile Wissahickon Creek watershed for the benefit of wildlife, the protection of local drinking water, and to ensure opportunities for the public to connect to nature exist into the future. Their work and methods include land preservation, active habitat management and restoration, and partnerships with neighbors, activists, and local governments. Natural Lands acts as a consultant to municipalities, advising them on how to steward their land and water for improved water quality. Their work for East Goshen Township serves as a case study for how simple open space design can improve water quality, create habitat, beautify a place and make open space more inviting to the surrounding community.

Land trusts play a critical role in protecting, restoring and stewarding water quality, and most identify water quality as a key driver for their conservation efforts. These goals align with public priorities; polling conducted by The Nature Conservancy suggests that voters prioritize water as a critical reason to engage in conservation, with 87% reporting it as very important to protect our drinking water quality. This session will review several case studies of large-scale habitat restoration projects completed by the Black Swamp Conservancy in the western Lake Erie Basin. These projects are driven by water quality improvements, but also provide critical benefits to wildlife and expand opportunities for public recreation and education. The session will discuss targeting of land for restoration purposes, including the development of a GIS model funded by Land Trust Alliance’s Great Lakes Water Quality Pilot Project. Finally, this session will discuss the unique challenges related to funding and managing these projects for land trusts thinking about undertaking large-scale restoration projects.

The worlds of land conservation and watershed protection often function parallel to one another despite their many areas of overlap. To bridge this gap, LTA and EPA have released two guides to aid land trusts in increasing their involvement in water quality work. In this session, we will provide an overview of these newly released resources, covering a range of topics useful in more effectively communicating water connections, including key watershed components, the Watershed Approach, Clean Water Act programs/funding sources related to land conservation/stewardship, and watershed protection strategies pertaining to building partnerships, strategic land conservation/stewardship, and community outreach techniques. To exemplify this type of work at the local level, Alachua Conservation Trust of Florida will present on its “springsheds” outreach strategy to protect the Santa Fe River Basin, which contains diverse forests, wetlands, wildlife, and working lands that are the base of local tourism and the state’s economy but are under threat from development, groundwater pumping, and nitrogen pollution. Lastly, Groundwork will discuss its community driven, designed, led, and implemented largescale green infrastructure projects aimed at improving the quality of life in New Orleans and at contributing to a healthier watershed that includes surrounding wetlands and Gulf of Mexico estuaries. Overall, we hope to encourage participants to utilize our guides and to take inspiration from the strategic, personable watershed protection/communication work being done in these East Coast settings. This session will also inform S&P1 (Ethics, Mission, Community Engagement) and S&P8 (Evaluating & Selecting Conservation Projects).

Land trusts often seek to increase public access to conserved lands through trails. But whether a site already has existing trails, or if new trails are proposed, maintenance and implementation challenges are common. The importance of a comprehensive assessment and planning process cannot be understated, and the consequences of poor planning include trials that are costly to maintain, dangerous for users, and cause environmental harm to the landscapes they traverse. So where can you start to assess and plan for a trail system that is sustainable, accessible, and doesn’t conflict with conservation goals? This workshop will outline the assessment and planning process, sharing considerations and tools that can be used by small and large land trusts (and even by volunteers!) alike to ensure that they know what to expect and can take an active role in creating functional trails and trail systems on conserved lands.

This session will review a five-year effort which culminated in the first entire watershed in Maine to have fish passage fully restored to Atlantic river herring and other anadromous fish species. They will talk about how this non-traditional land trust work was done leveraging non-traditional partnerships. This presentation will showcase who was involved, images of the construction and projects, efforts in working so closely with small coastal communities and local governments, and discussion about long-term impacts on fisheries management policy from local to national, and what this means for future and ongoing research, restoration and management efforts.

As the land conservation movement looks to expand its impact and reflects on its approach to equity, some land trusts have already ventured into new spaces, namely supporting the stewardship of vacant lots in neighborhoods and cities. In this session, Heartlands Conservancy will share their entrance into and approach to working on vacant land. They’ll discuss their philosophy, partners and projects. Additionally, the Center for Community Progress, the leading national nonprofit on vacancy and abandonment, will give a primer to understanding systemic vacancy, what roles land trusts/conservancies can play, and cover how to use their Vacant Land Stewardship Online Resource Center to begin your vacant land stewardship journey. This session will have two presentations, a group activity and plenty of time for questions and answers.

As environmental conditions shift in response to climate change and development, connected landscapes that allow wildlife to move between protected places are increasingly important. Additionally, hundreds of millions of animals are killed on roadways each year, including amphibians, birds, mammals, and other vertebrate species. Infrastructure like underpasses or overpasses can safely guide wildlife over and under roadways. However, such projects are only effective–and often only possible–if land on either side of the crossing project is protected. Land trusts play a vital role in integrating private land into landscape connectivity. This session focuses on the role of land trusts in contributing to landscape connectivity and conserving private land at pinch-point locations for wildlife movement. We’ll discuss the challenges, lessons learned, best practices, and emerging science and spatial products for connectivity conservation. We'll talk about the importance of private land conservation at discrete locations: on either side of a roadway where wildlife must move and are frequently hit by vehicles. We’ll discuss the role land trusts can play in the land security component of successful wildlife infrastructure projects, which are poised to receive a major funding boost under the new federal infrastructure law. Finally, we’ll include examples of landscape-scale conservation with land trusts and how they secured land adjacent to roads and helped mitigate the barrier to wildlife. There will be opportunities for participants to share experiences and examples of how they have engaged in these issues.

In Montana (and much of the West), river corridors have been modified or channelized for infrastructure, transportation, and agricultural production. Cumulatively, these modifications reduce the ecological benefits of natural fluvial processes at a time when climate change is causing historic fire, flooding, and drought across the country. These events are likely to become more common with impacts from drought and climate change. In response, climate adaptation tactics are critical to build drought and flood resilience at large scales. It’s critical to incentivize riparian corridor preservation, which is a unique and effective conservation strategy designed to enable large rivers and their floodplains to function at their fullest potential. They protect floodplain connectivity, offer flood hazard mitigation, and drought and climate resiliency. This panel discussion will present tools and resources from Montana and Colorado working to protect river and floodplain corridors for these reasons.