The purpose of this research project is to study the geography of exurban conservation easements adjacent to rapidly urbanizing areas of the United States. More specifically, the team will examine the locations of easement abundance and the reasons for the geographical variation in expression, in order to expose the causal relationships between governmental and individual decisions that stimulate this propagation. Conservation easements, a direct manifestation of economic precepts in geography and urban planning, have proliferated over the past thirty years in exurban areas adjacent to rapidly urbanizing areas. Their popularity may correspond to federal and state tax laws creating incentives for private land conservation in the public interest. However beneficial as a land preservation tool, cumulative private easement decisions are directly affecting public land use options, arguably without public input. After amassing a database of exurban easement characteristics and other political and legal factors in two rapidly urbanizing counties with high easement acreage in the pilot states of California and Colorado, the team expects to reveal the geographical variation in their location using spatial analysis techniques (e.g. cluster analysis, "hot spot" analysis, and spatial autocorrelation). The team will examine how public input during the easement process affected that spatial expression at both the state and county levels. The team also will assess the neighborhood effects of conservation easements on adjacent and county-level land costs, using multiple methodologies. Employing multivariate analysis, the team will examine the relationship between political and legal factors (at the federal, state, and local levels) and the easement proliferation. The findings from the pilot study will lead to replication of the methodology in regionally representative states around the country.
This project will have significant theoretical and practical implications, the most important of which is social equity. Although beneficial, conservation easements promote public subsidy of generally private actions with limited public oversight, little (if any) public access to the private land, relatively minimal enforcement, and other potential abuses (e.g. questionable valuation or land cost inflation). The results of this project should reveal a spatial effect from public input in the conservation easement conveyance process to both confirm and challenge existing theories about public oversight, ecologic value of the easement lands, and the social factors promoting and economic effect of conservation use. There are multiple broader impacts from the findings of this research, including implications for the tax law amendments at the federal and state levels, particularly for states that are just starting to embark on land preservation e.g. parts of the Southeast.
The primary outcome of the project is the construction of four viable, replicable datasets that are currently being analyzed. These are county-level datasets in two states (California and Colorado) that contain information that was previously unavailable in a consolidated format on the nature of conservation easements (CEs) in rapidly urbanizing areas, including the reasons for their placement, the holder typology, whether they are in perpetuity, whether they allow public access, and other relevant features. The CE characteristics are spatially linked with the associated parcels, and the assessor’s parcel values by year, from 1997 through 2008 (where available). Although the analyses are not yet complete, they are allowing the research team to assess the spatial and fiscal effects of CEs on the adjacent properties in the pilot counties, which intellectually contribute to the literature on CEs, and have immediate effect on the spatial geography of each county. Despite the counties’ disparate parcel size, land value, economic base, number of CEs, purpose/reasons for the CEs, and CE holder typology, so far, the datasets reveal two distinct spatial patterns of the CEs; both are clustered, but two are more heavily clustered and two are more dispersed at greater distances. The clustering is greater in the physically larger counties, even though they are in two different states. Additionally, there appears to be a relationship between clusters of higher land value and adjacent CE clusters in the counties. However, the research team is still determining the nature of these clusters, and the influences affecting their non-random location, as well as their fiscal effect on their adjacent parcel land values.
