The use of digital information to aid in land management decision making has become a standardized practice over the last 20 years. However, gathering this information for regional and national level analysis is problematic due to the number of organizations holding and gathering data along with compatibility issues within the data. Protected lands are a key component to landscape conservation efforts of the LCC’s and are also one of the keys to developing a response to climate change impacts. Many efforts, such as the Protected Areas Database (PAD) created by the Conservation Biology Institute and USGS have been undertaken, but these have largely focused on lands conserved in fee. The National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) has become the official resource for obtaining spatial data showing conservation easements across the country. In order to streamline the data collection effort, our partnership has coordinated with the PAD efforts to share information, allowing the PAD to be the primary provider of fee protected lands and NCED to be the primary provider of easement data. A national network of data providers is being created to provide data for both efforts and provide for continuous and coordinated updating of both databases for the LCC’s and other conservation organizations. The specific goals of this project were: 1) integration with LCC data coordinators to ensure all LCC’S have the latest version of the data available as new versions are made available for download; 2) continued data collection and refinement of NCED and 3) the development of standardized data collection systems for NCED data providers (including federal, state and regional data aggregators) into NCED. The objectives were to integrate the NCED into the LCC analysis efforts by delivering and presenting the database and its potential uses, update the data for at least 25 states, and develop protocols with federal agencies for data exchange.
