Into the Thick of it

As the spring daffodils fade and the trees begin to leaf out once more, a new season has also arisen at Blue Ridge Land Conservancy. Our dear Stewardship Manager Kate Glass has gone off to the greener pastures of retirement (where she will continue to do many a dog rescue transport) and I have stepped in to fill her very big shoes. This position is not wholly new to me as I have been going out with Kate ever since I started in September 2021. When I first started at BRLC, I did not imagine my internship would turn into a job which would turn into a full-time job. I was just a senior in college trying to figure out my thesis.

BRLC, as it turns out, has been a wonderful source of inspiration for that thesis, because the work we do is critical and yet often underexamined. When I presented my thesis advisor with the idea of doing a cost-benefit analysis on conservation easements in the Roanoke River watershed, she wanted to know what made Roanoke so special. Oh, what doesn’t, I responded. In the Roanoke River watershed (within Virginia—see map below), we miss most of the major national and state parks and forests, and yet, we are barely below the state average for percent of land conserved (16.8% roughly in the state compared to a rough 14% in our watershed).

How is that possible? Conservation easements.

Almost 50% of the conserved land in our watershed is held in conservation easements— efforts that are often dismissed as “small fish” gains. But recent research I conducted for my senior thesis highlight just how much these easements add up. Our cost-benefit analysis of conservation easements in the Roanoke River watershed was specifically looking for public costs and public benefits. When it comes to easements, public benefits can be captured in ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, pollination services, carbon capture and storage, and so much more that is provided by protected habitats. According to our model, those ecosystem services accounted for more than $1.159 billion worth of value provided to the public for just this watershed. Meanwhile, the cost (calculated as lost tax revenue from tax credits) was estimated at roughly $267 million for the area. That means that in the Virginia portion of the Roanoke River watershed, taxpayers see a 4.34x return on investment for the efforts of organizations like the Blue Ridge Land Conservancy.

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