Conserve

The first step in our strategy is carefully targeted conservation.

Within the five-million-acre northern Sierra region, the NSP partners identified six landscapes as priorities for investment based on their outstanding ecological, scenic or recreational values, and their role in maintaining functioning natural systems.

Within these landscapes, we use two primary conservation tools:

Conservation Easements: Conservation easements are voluntary, legal agreements between a private landowner and a non-profit entity like a land trust that permanently limit uses of the land to ensure protection of its conservation values. Land protected by a conservation easement remains in private ownership, but its future uses are permanently restricted per the terms of the easement.  The land trust or entity that holds the easement visits the land at least once a year to confirm that the terms of the easement are being met. 

Conservation easements are an excellent strategy for protecting land when public access is not a high priority. The value of a conservation easement is determined by an independent professional appraisal that compares the value of the land before and after the restrictions have been put in place. To learn more about conservation easements, check out the Sierra Valley Conservation Partnership Project.

Purchasing land in fee: When public access is important, buying land in fee (or outright) is typically the best option. Such was clearly the case when NSP worked with our partners to acquire Independence Lake, Royal Gorge, Webber Lake, Lower Carpenter Valley, Frog Lake and the Sierra Valley Preserve. These properties (and many others) are now owned and managed by one of our partners.

Occasionally, our partners will purchase land and transfer it to a public agency, as the Truckee Donner Land Trust did with Cold Stream Canyon (transferred to the U.S. Forest Service after eradicating most of the dirt roads on the property) and Summit Canyon (transferred to California State Parks for inclusion in Donner Lake State Park). To learn more about projects we have completed in each of our priority landscapes, see Past Projects.

Photo credit: Webber Lake © John Peltier