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=References=

// NCED //

The National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) is the first effort to compile and standardize spatial data related to conservation easements in the United States into a single national database (NCED website About). It is a public-private partnership between local, state and federal conservation organizations. The NCED “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” (NCED website About).

=Origins and current condition=

NCED was started in 2008 when the US Endowment for Forestry and Communities sent out a request for proposals (RFP) regarding the construction of a national conservation easement database. They then asked the different groups who submitted proposals to collaborate. These were the Defenders of Wildlife, NatureServe, the Trust for Public Land, Ducks Unlimited, and the Conservation Biology Institute. For the first two years, the five groups worked together to survey all known easement holders in the US. They determined which were were still active and acquired spatial data pertaining to conservation easements (Kai Henifin). The group then published spatial boundaries for 48,000 easements across 16 million acres of land in the first version of the database in October 2011 (Cons Bio Inst intro webinar). An updated version of the database published in June and September of 2013 made corrections and added newly digitized data. It also integrated data from the Protected Areas Database of the US (PAD-US), the Conservation Almanac, and the Conservation and Recreation Lands database (CARL) (webinar). This updated version included 101,203 conservation easements amounting to 20 million acres. As of 2018, NCED contains records on over 130,000 conservation easements which total 24.7 million acres. This is estimated to represent 60% of all US easements (NCED website). However, the total area under conservation easement is unknown.

=Structure=

Partners
The NCED is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that functions as a partnership between several conservation organizations, which serve specific roles. Ducks Unlimited acts as the data steward, managing the ESRI Enterprise geographic information system (GIS) database, and maps governmental conservation easements. The Trust for Public Land (TPL) seeks ongoing funding for the project and maps land trust conservation easements.

Contributors
Regular data contributors include the National Resources Conservation Service, the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Conservation Biology Institute has shared conservation easement information from their Protected Area Database since 2009. Various state, tribal, and local governments and land trusts in the US have also contributed data.

=Database=

Data acquisition
NCED partners acquire spatial data files and easement information from land trusts and government agencies that hold conservation easements. Contributing organizations and land trusts adhere to NCED’s metadata and data field guidelines. Data files in NCED have two components: a boundaries shapefile and its related attributes.

Processing and technical issues
After receiving new data, an NCED partner reviews and adds it to the database. Attributes are not always included in the spatial file; sometimes they must be manually added into the shapefile. Boundaries of adjacent properties are not always consistent with each other. Currently, the NCED manages this issue by snapping boundary polygons to a standard parcel layer which may differ from the original data provided by a landowner.

Privacy
NCED provides privacy by protecting landowner names and clearly displaying any land use restrictions in the database. Data providers can choose not to share boundaries or attributes. In the data display portal, “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” (NCED website About).

=Funding= Ongoing funding comes from the US Endowment for Forestry and Communities, from other federal agencies such as the US Geological Survey, and from various foundations (webinar). Funding primarily pays for employees within the partner organizations to manage the database (Kai Henifin).

=Limitations= The NCED is a work in progress and does not have every single conservation easement listed - though it does contain more than half of the known easements in America. The database may include both location and attribute errors due to the vast number of sources contributing information. The information found on the NCED cannot be considered reliable for legal uses as it is not reviewed by experts, but rather updated by those filing the conservation easements, and the risk of using the material provided in the NCED belongs to the user.

=References=