LANDOWNERS
The New River Land Trust provides outreach, education, facilitation and implementation services to landowners and others with an interest in conserving or restoring rural land with natural and cultural resources..
CONSERVATION
Historically, the NRLT’s primary conservation tool has been donated conservation easements and providing information about how these easements work. Conservation easements protect land for future generations while allowing owners to retain certain property rights. Through an easement, landowners willingly sell or donate only those rights necessary to protect specific conservation values.
Easements are individually tailored to meet a landowner’s goals and the landscape’s needs. Because the land remains in private ownership, with the remainder of the rights intact, an easement property continues to provide economic benefits for the area in the form of jobs, economic production and property taxes. However, every piece of land and every landowner’s needs are unique. The NRLT works hard to find conservation options that fit each situation.
For more detailed information about conservation easements and other conservation work of the Land Trust, you can download an overview.
If you are curious about conserving your land or have questions, please contact us.
restoration
One of the goals of the New River Land Trust is to help foster restoration projects throughout our service area. Restoring the natural environment can take different forms and address different problems. It could mean reforesting a fallowed field or replanting a cleared stream bank. Usually, the goal of restoration work is to restore some ecosystem services that may have been lost in an environment. Ecosystems can become degraded by agriculture, development, and more natural processes too like erosion.
Southwest Virginia has rare and endangered species who are directly affected by a degraded environment. Restoring a place to its more natural state benefits the community by offering resilience against a changing climate and changing land use.
Learn more about our ongoing stream restoration work - Headwaters of the Roanoke River Restoration Project.