USDA NRCS National Easement Assessment Project

Overview for Monitoring and Managing Conservation Easements

Katherine E. Edwards1, Matthew J. Gray1, John Glover 2, Heath M. Hagy1, Douglas C. Osborne1, William B. Sutton1, Gabriel D. Upchurch1, Zhimei Guo1

1University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries, Knoxville, TN, 37996

2 USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Easement Programs Division, Washington, DC 20250

NRCS Conservation Easement Programs

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is recognized as a leader in natural resource conservation on private lands by providing financial and technical assistance for landowners to conserve, restore, and protect natural resources (USDA/NRCS 1996; NABCI/IWJV 2009).

• Private lands are an essential component to natural resource conservation in the U.S. Over 50% of lands in the contiguous U.S. are managed for agriculture, forestry, or rangeland and nearly 80% of habitat needed for wildlife conservation is interspersed on lands under private-ownership (Benson 2001; NABCI/IWJV 2009).

• Conservation easements have become a commonly used and important strategy for protecting, enhancing, and restoring habitat on privately-owned land.

• Since 1992, NRCS has been acquiring conservation easements through Farm Bill programs. Currently, NRCS is responsible for monitoring and managing approximately 12,500 permanent easements (> 2.2 million acres) among the five conservation easement programs.

Current Status of NRCS Easement Monitoring

• Collectively, NRCS easement programs are defined as ‘stewardship lands’ by the Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 29 (SFFAS 29).

• As the easement holder, the NRCS has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the public investment on stewardship lands enrolled in USDA conservation easement programs.

• Once an easement is enrolled and restoration practices have been implemented, the NRCS is responsible for conducting periodic assessments to report condition of stewardship lands and determine whether easements are meeting national program objectives.

• Current monitoring is primarily conducted for compliance to determine whether there are potential encroachments on the easement by either the landowner or third parties.

• As per program provisions, NRCS is required to complete on-site monitoring once every three years, whereas off-site monitoring via remote sensing is allowed two out of three years to ensure that restoration practices are being maintained and that management is achieving program objectives (USDA/OIG 2008).

• NRCS has struggled to establish consistent monitoring protocols on easement lands and current monitoring efforts provide only limited qualitative information regarding easement condition and are incapable of informing adaptive management decisions.

Justification and Activities of NEAP

• The NRCS has recognized the need to develop standard procedures to ensure that easements are compliant with allowable land uses and to report on biological condition of easement lands.

• The NEAP will assist NRCS in determining best practices, financial and staff needs, and potential training needs to ensure effective monitoring, management, and enforcement of stewardship lands to meet Federal financial accountability requirements for stewardship lands (SFFAS 29).

• For Phase 1 of NEAP, monitoring protocols will be developed to assess current biological condition and inform adaptive management decisions for the five NRCS easement programs.

• Based on discussions and feedback from local, state and federal agencies, NGOs, conservation groups, academia, and other stakeholders, the NEAP team will compile monitoring recommendations from >200 natural resource professionals and practitioners for the five USDA NRCS easement programs.

• NEAP will develop preliminary national-scale bioassessment approaches that will include a core set of ecological indicators that may be measured on all easements to accurately assess and report on biological condition. A multi-tiered, quantitative sampling approach will be developed to allow the NRCS to report condition at national, regional, and local levels.

• NEAP will develop and test strategies of remote sensing and GIS technologies for remotely monitoring compliance and large-scale ecological attributes associated with easements to offer a potential cost-efficient alternative to site visits.

• Cost-benefit analyses will be performed for all recommended strategies.

• Dependent on funding, Phase 2 of NEAP will include designing and conducting essential pilot studies across the United States to test indicators and modify bioassessment approaches for assessing condition of easements and to identify relationships between remotely-sensed and on-site data.

• Ultimately, NEAP strategies will help guide ecological monitoring, adaptive management and compliance verification on NRCS easements, and will contribute to validating the investment of public funds on private lands for natural resource conservation.

The National Easement Assessment Project (NEAP) is a collaborative effort between the USDA NRCS Easement Programs Division and the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture to develop strategies to monitor biological condition, adaptively manage, and ensure compliance of NRCS easements enrolled in the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP), Grassland Reserve Program (GRP), Healthy Forests Reserve Program (HFRP), Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program (FRPP), and the Emergency Watershed

Protection Program-Floodplain Easements (EWPP-FPE).

Proposed NRCS hierarchical monitoring framework

Literature Cited

Benson, D. E. 2001. Wildlife and recreation management on private lands in the United States. Wildlife Society Bulletin 29:359–371.

North American Bird Conservation Initiative Committee and Intermountain West Joint Venture [NABCI and IWJV]. 2009. Field guide to the 2008 Farm Bill for fish and wildlife conservation (version 1.1).

United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service [USDA/NRCS]. 1996. Framework for the future of wildlife.

United States Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General, Western Region [USDA/OIG]. 2008. Audit Report: Natural Resources Conservation Service, Wetlands Reserve Program, Wetlands Restoration and Compliance. Report No. 10099-4-SF (August), Washington, DC.