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The movement to protect the nation's farmland, forests and open spaces has seen a dramatic increase over the past five years, according to the 2005 National Land Trust Census Report (PDF 363KB), and the establishment of local and state land trusts has kept pace, increasing by 32 percent over the same period.        

Total acres conserved by local, state and national land trusts increased 54 percent to 37 million acres over the past five years, said Rand Wentworth, president of the Land Trust Alliance, which publishes the census and tracks national trends in private land conservation from its home base in Washington, DC. The report is available free at http://www.lta.org/.

A land trust is a nonprofit organization that works to conserve land by undertaking or assisting in land or conservation easement acquisition or by stewardship of such land or easements, according to the Alliance. The National Land Trust Census was created to document the pace, volume and type of land conservation occurring in the United States and to assess the effectiveness of private, voluntary efforts to conserve land for land trust professionals and policymakers. The Alliance surveyed approximately 1,840 land conservation organizations in the U.S. to compile the 2005 census.

One of the fastest-growing and most successful conservations movements in American history, there are currently 1,667 land trusts in the United States. The Land Trust Alliance, established in 1982 to advance the mission of land trusts, has not only trained thousands of conservation leaders and worked to professionalize the standards and practices of land trusts, but has led the effort to increase tax incentives for conservation of private lands. Since 1997, the Alliance has received more than $4 million in support from the C.S. Mott Foundation, primarily for the Alliance’s work to build the capacity of local and state-level land trusts in the Great Lakes basin and much of the southeastern U.S.  According to the census data, such land trusts have conserved more than 200,000 acres in the Great Lakes (with about half of this number in Michigan alone) and more than 600,000 acres in the Southeast. The protection figures rise dramatically for both regions (582,851 acres in the Great Lakes and 4,069,893 acres in the Southeast) when one includes the lands protected by national organizations, such as The Nature Conservancy.