For Land Trusts and Conservation Groups

How Land Trusts Can Use LandScope America

Over the past year, through surveys, workshops, and one-on-one conversations, we have reached out to land trusts and other partners to learn what resources and tools will help you do your work better. Based on what you’ve told us, we’re building features that empower you to do things such as: 

• Use simple online GIS tools to create, share, and print maps of your existing or planned conservation projects.
• Display your projects in the context of regional or national conservation priorities.
• View detailed current aerial photography of your region.
• Share your organization’s conservation vision with policy makers, partners, and local supporters.
• Create and connect online communities of people who care about the land. 
• Learn from one another, sharing success stories, challenges, quick tips, and best practices via online forums. 
• Use the website as an outreach tool to build local constituencies and support for your organization’s conservation vision.
• Let landowners find your land trust via the website by entering their zip code or clicking on their location, and then finding your organization’s contact information and website link.

Land trusts can have a direct role in creating the LandScope America experience by adding your voice to this initiative. Your input will help shape the most-wanted features being considered:

• The ability for users to contribute content by uploading their own photos, success stories, and comments about places to share with others.
• The ability to create an organizational profile that depicts your organization’s mission, goals, priorities, land holdings and service areas.
• The ability to create and save customized map views of interest to you, link to them, and share them with your friends or constituents.

Opportunities for Input

Working in partnership with the Land Trust Alliance, NatureServe is actively engaged with the land trust community to better understand your needs for information and tools. Add your voice to this effort. Here are a few ways you can be heard:

• Use the Contact Us form to make comments and ask questions.
• Become a “content partner” and submit one of your land trust’s success stories to us for publication on the LandScope America site. (To do so, contact the editor, Kyle Copas, at kyle_copas@natureserve.org).
• Give feedback in person at NatureServe sessions about this project held at Land Trust Alliance regional conferences and at Rally.
• Take our Land Trust Survey.

Take our Land Trust Survey 

Nearly 200 land trust board members and staff have already taken our online survey describing their information needs and rating the website features they would find most useful.  If you’d like to provide your input, just follow the link below. It should take about 15-20 minutes to fill out. Thanks in advance for your time and input. 

Take the survey now!  (If necessary, copy this URL into your web browser:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=BAlBCjHIxp9sps_2bMMeH1OA_3d_3d )