Colorado Open Lands
What is a Land Trust?
Land trusts are local, independent nonprofit organizations that work with landowners who want to protect open land for conservation, recreation, and other public benefit.
Land trusts may acquire land through donation or purchase, hold negotiated conservation easements, use partial development to finance the protection of the rest of the land, or utilize life estates that allow the owner to live on the land for their lifetime, after which the land reverts to the land trust.
In addition to direct land conservation, grassroots land trusts often educate public decision-makers about the ecological and economic benefits of protecting open space, and frequently plan and conduct environmental education programs for their communities' school children.
Land trusts are at the vanguard of the trend toward local self-sufficiency and individual action to address today's conservation challenges. There are currently over 1,500 individual land trust organizations in the country.
According to the Land Trust Alliance, these local and regional groups have helped to conserve over 9.3 million acres of productive farm and forest land, sensitive watershed areas, scenic and recreational lands, and important wetlands and wildlife habitat.
While some of the land trusts are professionally staffed organizations with long experience in conserving land, over half of the nation's land trusts are small groups run solely by volunteers.
Land trusts succeed because they operate in the private sector and use flexible, voluntary methods of land conservation. In recent years, the role of nonprofit land trusts in conserving community open space has become increasingly central to conservation in America.
As people look more and more to local, non-governmental solutions to protecting key resources, local and regional land trusts are shouldering more and more responsibility for land conservation.