CONS_NCED

ISO-19139 Metadata

Resource Identification Information:

Citation:
Title:  CONS_NCED

Reference date - publication:  2011-08-01

Edition date:  2011-08-01
Presentation format:  mapDigital

Party responsible for the resource - publisher: 
Organization's name: National Conservation Easement Database

Themes or categories of the resource:  environment, boundaries

Place keywords:
Keywords:  United States

Theme keywords:
Keywords:  Conservation Planning, Conservation Easement, GAP codes

Theme keywords:
Keywords:  Conservation Planning, Conservation Easement, GAP codes

Theme keywords:
Keywords:  Conservation Planning, Conservation Easement, GAP codes

Theme keywords:
Keywords:  environment, boundaries

Thesaurus name:
Title:  ISO 19115 Topic Category

Theme keywords:
Keywords:  environment, boundaries

Thesaurus name:
Title:  ISO 19115 Topic Category

Descriptive keywords:
Keywords:  Downloadable Data

Thesaurus name: ArcGIS Content Type
Abstract:  The National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) is a collaborative venture to compile easement records (both spatial and tabular) from land trusts and public agencies throughout the United States in a single, up-to-date, sustainable, GIS compatible, online source. The goal of the NCED is to provide a comprehensive picture of the estimated 20 million acres of privately owned conservation easement lands, recognizing their contribution to America's natural heritage, a vibrant economy, and healthy communities. Conservation easements are legal agreements voluntarily entered into between landowners and conservation entities (agencies or land trusts) for the express purpose of protecting certain societal values such as open space or vital wildlife habitats. In some cases landowners transfer "development rights" for direct payment or for federal and state tax benefits.

Purpose: NCED will for the first time show a comprehensive picture of privately owned conservation easement lands in the U.S. The NCED will allow better strategic planning for conservation and development by merging data on land protection with biodiversity and resources, improving ecological and economic plans and investments. State and regional planners and managers will appreciate this dataset as it provides critical contextual information for their work. Institutions responsible for national and international reporting will find this database full of reliable, accurate information for their purposes. The scientific and conservation community will similarly benefit from having this standardized base map to carry out their research and planning objectives.

Dataset language:  eng
Dataset character set:  utf8

Status:  completed
Maintenance:
Date of next update:  2011-12-01
Update frequency:  biannually


Scope of the updates:  dataset

Resource constraints:
Constraints:
Limitations of use: Definition of NCED Project Team: Whereas, the NCED Project Team, represents the organizations involved in the NCED Project, which includes: The Conservation Biology Institute, Defenders of Wildlife, Ducks Unlimited, NatureServe and The Trust for Public Land. 1. The NCED Project Team has received the required consent from the data providers for NCED portal users to access and use non-sensitive conservation easement data (as defined by the data providers). 2. The NCED Project Team shall have no liability for any claim of infringement or rights by third parties based on any use of the NCED dataset in combination with programs, software, hardware, or equipment not designated by the NCED Project Team, without prior written approval by the NCED Project Team, if such infringement could have been avoided had the NCED dataset not been so used. 3. The NCED Project Team shall have no liability or responsibility to the data users, or any other person or entity with respect to any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the NCED dataset, including but not limited to any interruption of service, loss of business, anticipatory profits or indirect, special, or consequential damages resulting from the use or operation of the NCED dataset. 4. The NCED Project Team warrants that the data and metadata in the NCED dataset have been accurately compiled, and reviewed to ensure compliance with the NCED Quality Assurance and Control Procedures.

Resource constraints:
Legal constraints:
Access constraints:  otherRestrictions

Other constraints: Access constraints: None.

Resource constraints:
Legal constraints:
Use constraints:  otherRestrictions

Other constraints: Use constraints: This information is in the public domain unless otherwise noted in the Security attribute or restricted by prior agreement.

Resource constraints:
Security constraints:
Classification:  unclassified
Classification system: NCED

Additional restrictions on handling the resource: To address any data sensitivity concerns, data providers where given the option to either: 1) display all data (spatial and non-spatial), and allow it to be downloadable, 2) display and download only non-spatial data (easement boundaries not available for viewing or downloading). 3) display all data (spatial and non-spatial), but not allow spatial data to be downloadable The NCED team did not request land owner contact information, thus that information is not available for any of the easements aggregated for the NCED.

Spatial representation type:  vector

Processing environment: Esri ArcGIS 12.4.0.19948

Extent:
Extent description: publication date

Geographic element - Bounding rectangle:
Extent contains the resource: true
West longitude: -85.457047
East longitude: -66.113832
North latitude: 49.542754
South latitude: 34.650213
2011-06-06
Extent:
Geographic element - Bounding rectangle:
Extent contains the resource: true
West longitude: -85.457047
East longitude: -66.113832
North latitude: 49.542754
South latitude: 34.650213
Supplemental information: The goals for the first phase of the NCED project were to develop a database schema (standard attribute list, domains and spatial reference) for the easement database; develop methods and standards for data collection and aggregation; collect as many of the existing conservation currently in GIS format as possible; aggregate and develop metadata to characterize the conservation easements; and provide a web portal where users can digitize new easements, query and view the NCED data, produce reports, and download data. At the end of phase I (July 31, 2011), the NCED contained 80,756 easements, totaling 17,818,164 acres. The NCED portal will be released to the public in early August 2011. In the second phase of NCED, starting in August 2011, the NCED project team will begin digitizing the non-digital easements that were identified in Phase I, perform additional data improvements, continue with data collection efforts, and market the NCED database to land planners and conservation organizations. Data will be updated on an ongoing basis as funding supports.

Credits: The NCED project partners would like to thank the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities for their leadership and forethought for putting the NCED team together and for the initial funding that allowed the NCED to be formed. Additional support for the NCED project was provided by the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation and the Knobloch Family Foundation. We would also like to thank Greg Schildwachter for his leadership skills in guiding the project partners through this two-year journey. While the NCED partners were responsible for aggregating conservation easements from across the country, the NCED database would not have been successful without the cooperation of many federal, state, and local agencies, regional and state data repositories, and individual land trusts. We would like to thank the many state and federal agencies and local land trusts that took part in this endeavor. In addition, we would like to provide specific acknowledgement of the following organizations for their provision of state-wide, regional or national data: COMap - Colorado State University; Clemson University, David Holman - Greater Chicago area protected lands; Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission; Florida Natural Areas Inventory; GreenInfo - California Protected Areas Database; Kansas Natural Heritage Inventory; Kentucky Natural Heritage Program; Maine State Planning Office; Maryland Environmental Trust; Montana Natural Heritage Programs, University of Montana in partnership with the Montana State Library; Nebraska Natural Heritage Program, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission; The Nature Conservancy; Utah Conservation Data Center, State of Utah Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife Resources; Virginia Natural Heritage Program, Department of Conservation and Recreation; Natural Resources Conservation Service; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; U.S. Forest Service.

Point of contact - pointOfContact: 
Individual's name: Allison Anderson
Organization's name: Conservation Biology Institute

Contact information:
Phone:
Voice: 425-286-6749
Contact instructions: For more information about the NCED project and database, please contact: Allison Anderson Conservation Biology Institute 425-286-6749 allison@consbio.org Gina LaRocco Defenders of Wildlife 503-697-3222 GLaROCCO@defenders.org Robb Macleod Ducks Unlimited 734-623-2000 rmacleod@ducks.org Shara Howie NatureServe 703-797-4811 shara_howie@natureserve.org Breece Robertson The Trust for Public Land 505-988-5922 breece.robertson@tpl.org

Spatial Representation - Vector:

Level of topology for this dataset:  geometryOnly
Geometric objects:
Object type:  composite

Reference System Information:

Reference system identifier:
Value: 102039
Code space: EPSG
Version: 6.12(9.3.0.0)

Data Quality Information:

Scope of quality information:
Level of the data:dataset

Lineage:
Process step:
Description: To start the data collection process, the NCED team developed a list of organizations that could potentially hold conservation easements. A large number of conservation easements throughout the United States are held by local land trust organizations. The Land Trust Alliance represents more than 1,700 land trusts throughout the United States and does a periodic census of the land trusts to record the number and acres of conservation lands. A list of land trusts was obtained from the Land Trust Alliance for the NCED project. In addition, a list of state agencies that could potentially hold easements was generated as well as county agencies that have passed a conservation finance ballot measure (bonds, property tax, sales tax, etc.) for open space and watershed protection efforts. These lists were combined and organized by state. A list of federal agencies and national or regional conservation organizations that could potentially hold easements were generated from the NCED teams past experience. The lists of all organizations and agencies that could potentially hold conservation easements were combined into a database that tracked the status of data collection efforts (hereinafter 'NCED Tracker'). The NCED Team divided the data collection responsibilities into states and regional or national organizations. The data collection efforts were divided up among the NCED project team based on past data collection experience and affiliations. If the organizations that were contacted had easements, but did not want to participate, or had easements that were not digitized, the number and acreage was recorded in the NCED Tracker, as well as notes on whether the organization should be contacted in Phase II of the project. If organizations contacted did not respond to multiple calls over an extended period of time, that was also documented in the NCED Tracker and will be re-contacted in Phase II. When data is received from an organization, it is reviewed in its native format and checked for any obvious errors and missing attributes. The initial quality control consists of viewing the data along with other base information (digital orthophotos, topographic maps, etc) to make sure the polygons are in a logical location and reviewing the attributes to determine if additional information is needed to fulfill the NCED attribute requirements. If any problems are encountered or if additional information is needed, the organization is re-contacted to determine if corrections are needed or collect additional information regarding the easement. Once the data has passed the initial quality control process, it is re-projected into the NCED projection (USA Contiguous Albers Equal Area Conic USGS projection). The next step in the data aggregation process is to create an empty personal geodatabase with the NCED schema. The original data is then loaded into the empty geodatabase and the original attributes are mapped to the correct NCED attributes. Once the data is loaded any additional attributes are added to the database (data entry date, data aggregator, etc.). After the original data was formatted and placed in the personal geodatabase, they are loaded into the partner NCED geodatabase replica. The NCED geodatabase replica is then synchronized with the master NCED geodatabase. The NCED project uses a distributed geodatabase as the workflow between CBI (database administrator) and other NCED partners. Either a check-out geodatabase or two-way replica was created between CBI and NCED project team. Replicas were then synchronized periodically between CBI and the NCED project team.

Data quality report - Conceptual consistency:
Measure description: Data evaluated according to the "NCED Quality Assurance and Control Procedures" developed by the NCED technical team that document a data aggregation and quality control (QC) process that supports the creation of a standardized, high quality national conservation easement dataset. This work is being done collaboratively by the National Conservation Easement Data (NCED) partners (CBI, TPL, Ducks Unlimited, NatureServe, and Defenders). QC goals: 1) Attribute Table: Ensure that all required attributes (as defined by the NCED team) are complete and accurate. 2) Polygon: Ensure correct projection, and identification or elimination of: - duplicate polygons, - polygons with overlaps, data gaps or other boundary discrepancies, and - sensitive data. The QC / QA is currently underway; the DRAFT dataset likely has some missing attributes, data errors, and overlapping or duplicate polygons. Please check for a FINAL version of the NCED dataset and use that to replace the DRAFT dataset.

Data quality report - Completeness omission:
Measure description: While compiling the NCED database, the partners also kept track of the number of easements that were not currently in digital format or withheld from the NCED database. There were a total of 12,182 easements (2,126,341 acres) not in digital format that were not included in the NCED database. Digitizing these easements will be a part of Phase II of the NCED project. There were a total of 42,884 easements (10,741,920 acres) that were withheld from the NCED database. A majority of these easements (40,210 easements - 10,387,334 acres) were the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service private land easements in the prairie pothole region of the U.S. Note that some of the numbers and acres on non-digitized easements are estimates since the exact numbers were either not provided or the exact numbers could not be easily estimated. This is especially true for the Department of Transportation where many states either did not respond or were only able to provide general estimates of total easements and acres. There were also Land Trust that did not respond to inquiries, so those numbers are also unknown. For additional information about known non-digital easements not currently in NCED and easements withheld from NCED, please see Table 1 in the "NCED Users Guide".

Data quality report - Quantitative attribute accuracy:
Measure description: In addition to the initial quality control measures that checked for internal consistency and accuracy from individual data providers, the NCED database was reviewed for overlapping polygons. Three basic types of overlaps were identified: duplicate easements, stacked easements, and overlapping easements. Duplicate easements occurred when the same easement boundary was obtained from two different source organizations. These easements were identified, compared, and reconciled so that each easement is only represented in the NCED database a single time. Stacked easements occur when there are two legitimate easements that cover the same or part of the same geography. In these cases, the STACKED attribute in the NCED database is changed to "Yes" to indicate to the user that these are legitimate easements, i.e., there are no known errors in the data. Overlapping easements occur when two or more easements overlap in part of the same geography and are not suppose to overlap, i.e., overlap due to mapping errors in one or both easements. Fixing all of these overlap was beyond the scope of Phase I, so many of these overlap are identified in the CONFLICT attribute as "Conflict - No Adjustment" and will be targeted to be fixed in Phase II. When aggregating multiple data sources it is difficult to stay consistent with easement holder names. Although many of the attributes in the NCED data have domains (i.e., set values were provided in a drop down menu) which standardizes field values. However, it was not within the scope of this effort to standardize the easement holder names field due to the large number of easement holder name variations used by organizations that hold easements, i.e., invariably there will be multiple spellings or abbreviations to organization names. The remaining attributes in the NCED database were also reviewed and adjusted to reduce similar anomalies.

Distribution Information:

Distributor:
Distributor information - distributor: 
Individual's name: Ty Montgomery
Organization's name: The Other Firm

Contact information:
Phone:
Voice: 503-336-5359
Contact instructions: For more information about the NCED portal, please contact: 1) NCED Portal - General Inquiries Kassandra Kelly Defenders of Wildlife kkelly@defenders.org 503-697-3222 2) NCED Portal - Technical Inquiries Ty Montgomery The Other Firm ty@theotherfirm.com 503-336-5359
Ordering process:
Terms and fees: none
Turnaround time: The main site for viewing, summarizing, and downloading the NCED database is the NCED Portal. The NCED Portal was based on Defenders of Wildlife's Conservation Registry web portal and allows the user to perform data queries, reporting, and data downloads; as well as digitize conservation easements. The NCED database will also be available on other partner web sites: Conservation Registry (DoW) CARL (DU) - http://www.ducks.org/conservation/glaro/carl-gis-layer LandScope America (NatureServe) - http://www.landscope.org/ Conservation Almanac (TPL) - http://www.conservationalmanac.org/ Data Basin Protected Areas Center (CBI) - http://databasin.org/protected-center

Transfer options:
Format:
Format name: Enterprise Geodatabase Feature Class

Transfer options:
Online resource:
Online location:http://www.conservationeasement.us/
Transfer options:
Online resource:
Online location:http://www.conservationeasement.us
Description: The NCED's primary publication outlet is the NCED Portal (http://www.conservationeasement.us), a dedicated resource built as an extension of The Conservation Registry (http://www.conservationregistry.org).

Metadata Information:

Metadata language:  eng
Metadata character set:  utf8


Last update:  2019-10-02
Maintenance:
Date of next update:  2011-12-01
Update frequency:  biannually


Scope of the updates:  dataset


Metadata contact - pointOfContact: 
Individual's name: Allison Anderson
Organization's name: Conservation Biology Institute

Contact information:
Phone:
Voice: 425-286-6749
Scope of the data described by the metadata:  dataset
Scope name: dataset

Name of the metadata standard used: ISO 19139 Geographic Information - Metadata - Implementation Specification
Version of the metadata standard: 2007