Choose & Learn About a Place

The American landscape is beyond compare -- its green hills and forests, fertile fields, rugged peaks, and diamond deserts are captured in song and story and the national imagination. The prosperity that flows from these bountiful lands has defined our history and who we are—our values and culture.

But despite the promise of America’s vast spaces and open country, many cherished and important places face unprecedented pressures and threats. The conservation community and the citizens who comprise it have recognized the urgent need to protect these treasured places and open spaces of our working and wild lands. 

For this purpose, NatureServe and the National Geographic Society are partnering to create LandScope America. This landmark initiative aspires to boost efforts to protect America’s lands and waters and guide conservation toward the places that need it most.

LandScope America will enrich your understanding of America's unique places by presenting compelling accounts and stories of these places and the people working to save them. Bringing together great writing, photography, audio and video will deepen your appreciation for these areas and help you see the reasons for protecting them.

Visitors to LandScope America can use its map viewer to navigate the sights and sounds of the American landscape simply by searching by place name or Zip code. The map will zoom in to highlight photos, narratives, video and sound files georeferenced to your selected location. You can learn what's special about the area, present and past land uses, and the plants and animals it sustains.

For its initial release in late 2008, LandScope America will provide the breadth of a national conservation picture, bringing together a wide array of information and content from many national, state, and local partners. To demonstrate the full power and richness of the site, we will create in-depth treatments about locations in five pilot states – Colorado, Florida, Maine, Virginia, and Washington. As an example, the gallery at right provides an in-depth profile of one of the hottest of the nation's biodiversity hotspots, the Clinch River Valley of southeastern Virginia.

During the project’s next phase, we'll expand our encyclopedic coverage through the rest of the country while moving toward the goal of making LandScope America, simply, the conservation guide to America’s natural places.