Remote Monitoring Grant Program

Increasingly, land trusts are discovering the power of bolstering their stewardship toolkits with new technologies and perspectives. Remote monitoring has helped stewardship teams and landowners gain new perspectives on their work, respond quickly to threats to conserved land and work more efficiently to uphold the promise of protecting land in perpetuity. The Land Trust Alliance, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy in California, is excited to announce a new program to support land trusts in exploring how remote monitoring technologies can help to enhance their stewardship work. The program will:

• help land trusts build capacity for effective and efficient stewardship;
• make advanced technologies more accessible for land trusts;
• encourage land trusts to explore new approaches in a low-risk trial;
• provide an opportunity to learn through practice what works and what doesn’t for land trusts with different needs; and
• generate new peer learning opportunities for grantees to share the knowledge they gain with the wider land trust community.

In 2021, the Alliance is thrilled to offer $219,000 in grants to the following projects: 

• Adirondack Land Trust will begin its first year of remote monitoring by comparing satellite and drone-based approaches across 16,000 acres of rugged forest terrain and farmland in upstate New York.  
• Arizona Land and Water Trust will build new partnerships with The Nature Conservancy in Arizona and Borderlands Restoration Network to monitor over 23,000 acres of desert and scrubland in southern Arizona using satellite imagery. 
• Blue Ridge Conservancy hopes to build staff capacity and improve monitoring efficiency this year by using Upstream Tech’s Lens platform to access satellite imagery covering over 8,000 conserved acres in the mountains of western North Carolina.
• Eastern Sierra Land Trust, which stewards many large properties in challenging terrain in California, will explore how remotely captured imagery from both satellites and high-altitude balloons may help their stewardship team to more effectively monitor 12,000 acres this year. 
• Foothills Conservancy of North Carolina will establish a remote monitoring program using satellite imagery that aims to improve their stewardship team’s resilience and efficiency and decrease costs for annual monitoring on over 7,800 acres. 
• Hawaiian Islands Land Trust will use GeoCento’s EarthImages service to capture satellite imagery for 20,000 conserved acres across five of the state’s islands.  
• Hudson Highlands Land Trust, in collaboration with the New York Highlands Network, will expand on their past use of remote monitoring by working with Skytec LLC and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy this year. HHLT will use Skytec’s Ranger platform to monitor 3,550 acres, and collaborate with Skytec and the Lincoln Institute to pilot the assessment of small-scale automated change detection to help identify challenges to conserved land more quickly.  
• Hunterdon Land Trust, D&R Greenway Land Trust and Tewksbury Land Trust in New Jersey will collaborate to pilot remote monitoring of 8,850 acres of easements and fee owned lands using Upstream Tech’s Lens platform. 
• Lower Shore Land Trust will work with Maryland Environmental Trust to pilot a project to train local Maryland land trusts to adopt Upstream Tech’s Lens platform, drawing on MET’s successful first year conducting remote monitoring on 2020. Together, LSLT and MET will use satellite imagery to monitor 70,900 acres in the Chesapeake watershed this year. 
• Minnesota Land Trust will build on its success last year in incorporating remote monitoring approaches across 25,000 acres and explore further efficiencies in integrating their monitoring and database software, as well as take on a more comprehensive analysis of the costs and benefits of their monitoring program to better inform the wider land trust community about these tools. 
• Northwest Connecticut Land Conservancy will incorporate new satellite-based approaches to their monitoring program this year covering a 12,500 acre portfolio, while sharing knowledge and support for exploring these tools with up to 30 additional regional land trust partners.  
• Otsego Land Trust in New York will access high-resolution satellite imagery to monitor its 11,000 conserved acres in 2021, and also work with a local drone operator to capture imagery and develop ortho-mosaic maps of two properties to better understand how these tools can help track changes on the landscape. 
• Pacific Forest Trust will work with the satellite imagery vendor Planet Labs to purchase on-demand imagery to monitor working forest easements covering 110,000 acres across California. 
• Palmer Land Conservancy in Colorado will begin working with Skytec LLC to compare their Ranger application with other technologies the organization has used previously to monitor 70,000 acres in the Arkansas and South Platte watershed basins. 
• Sonoma Land Trust and Land Trust of Napa Valley in California will work together to use remote monitoring on a large scale for the first time in either organization’s history. They will use satellite imagery to monitor over 44,300 acres, including areas vulnerable to wildfires to assess post-disaster impacts on the landscape. 
• The Vital Ground Foundation, Kaniksu Land Trust and the Idaho Department of Lands will develop a public-private partnership model for conducting remote monitoring on over 104,600 acres of their large and overlapping service areas in Idaho and Montana using satellite imagery. 
• Upper Peninsula Land Conservancy in Michigan will work to enhance their small team’s remote monitoring program developed last year in response to the pandemic. Using satellite imagery through Upstream Tech’s Lens platform, they will explore options to more efficiently integrate monitoring of 6,200 acres with their database systems and build partnerships with other regional land trusts around remote monitoring. 
• Upper Savannah Land Trust will use remote monitoring to build capacity for its volunteer-driven stewardship team and aims to demonstrate how these tools can potentially benefit an organization without full-time stewardship staff. They will use satellite imagery to cover 53,000 acres in South Carolina. 

The program will continue through 2022 — stay tuned for the second application cycle for an additional cohort in 2022. Interested in learning more about remote monitoring? Visit the Learning Center's for additional resources to learn about how your land trust can get started with remote monitoring.

Contact Jake Faber, NRCS pilot project manager, with any questions.