Good News! The Upper Savannah Land Trust has been awarded a GRANT for acquiring high-resolution satellite images that can help us with our annual monitoring of conservation easements. We were one of 18 land trusts across the U.S. to receive generous funding from the Land Trust Alliance and The Nature Conservancy in California to help acquire the imagery and analysis tools necessary to try it out over our upcoming monitoring cycle.
The retrospective images shown here, showing the same 500-acre scene in McCormick County on three different years, are simply grabbed from Google Earth. But they are of similar resolution as we’ll be able to acquire at our desired intervals, and desired locations, across our entire 53,000-acre portfolio in the western piedmont of SC. In this example, you can see forest management is occurring (which we like), and if there were rooftops or asphalt popping up (which we don’t like) we’d see that as well. That is the kind of assessment the Land Trust undertakes every year for each of our conservation easements. We will always have “boots on the ground,” but we hope that “eyes in the skies” will make our work more efficient and effective.
