Recommended Practices for Remote Property Monitoring from The Nature Conservancy in California

For nearly two decades, The Nature Conservancy's California chapter has explored the use of remote sensing to meet annual property monitoring requirements. This paper provides key information learned in the exploration of remote property monitoring.

Before developing a remote monitoring program, a land trust needs to weigh the benefits and the drawbacks of this type of stewardship. This pointer offers considerations to help with that analysis.

This is a sample aerial monitoring form from the accredited Columbia Land Trust.

Sample property monitoring guidelines from the accredited Land Trust of North Alabama.

TNC-CA worked with Nancy Thomas of Geospatial Innovation Facility at University of California Berkeley to survey land trusts using remote monitoring to gauge interest and ideal scenarios and published the results.

Join Kate Losey, Land Trust Alliance, Kaytee Currie-Huggard, The Upper Valley Land Trust and Will Donahoo, New Mexico Land Conservancy, as they lay out the return on investment from a variety of methods used by land trusts, policies and procedures used to meet Land Trust Standards and Practices.

This guidance covers Practice 11C: Conservation Easement Monitoring.

It’s a brave new world of stewardship technology, but it can be daunting to figure out whether remote monitoring is right for your land trust and where to start. The Land Trust Alliance created this toolkit to provide you with the information you and your team need to make the right decisions.

This report details the results of a series of interviews, focus groups and surveys that tracked the experiences of the 12 land trusts in the Keep It Colorado grantee cohort as they acquired and implemented new remote monitoring technologies during the 2020 monitoring season.