A Conservation Vision for the Decade Ahead

In 2011, USVLT completed a 10-Year Strategic Conservation Plan that centered on a  Natural Resource Inventory  of its 11-town service area. Based on the geography of 12 key resources and their relative importance to USVLT, Focus Areas were developed to identify high conservation value areas.

Over the last decade, USVLT has conserved 6,000 additional acres and completed 40 new projects in the Upper Saco Valley. To date, the Land Trust has completed over 80 projects conserving 13,000 acres.

Slide the split-screen back and forth to explore new land conservation projects over the last decade.

2012 conserved lands are shown on the left screen, and 2022 conserved lands are on the right screen.

USVLT projects are highlighted in bright green, click on properties to learn more about them.

The Strategic Planning Committe identified 14 Conservation Resources as core to the Land Trust's conservation priorities:

To explore these core resources, click on the arrows(>>) in the upper left of the map to expand the legend where resource layers can be toggled on and off.

To expand each layer legend further, click on the arrow (>) to the right of each Layer Title .

For some layers with additional information, click a feature on the map to view the pop-up window.

Once resources were identified, a Delphi scoring process was used to rank resources based on relative priority to the Land Trust and its conservation goals.

Using these resources, a "Co-Occurrence Map" was created by combining the geographic area of all layers, and weighting them based on the above scores.

The result is the map to the right, which shows aggregate scores of all resources, weighted by priority. The darker regions represent the overlap of many high value resources.

To understand these scores on a parcel-by-parcel basis, an areal weighted reaggregation was done to generate the average score for each parcel using the best available tax parcel data. (Turn on the "Parcels" Co-Occurence Score layer in the legend.)

Based on these co-occurrence scores, the Committee developed Focus Areas (shown in yellow) that represent unconserved regions of high conservation priority. Focus Area boundaries were delineated based on parcel boundaries, score threshholds, roads, and existing development.

Again, click on the arrows (>>) in the upper left of the map to expand layers and explore the Co-Occurrence maps and Focus Areas in greater depth.

To access more natural resource data for the Upper Saco Valley and beyond, check out these interactive maps:

 NH Wildlife Corridors Map 

 Maine Beginning with Habitat Maps 

 The Nature Conservancy Resilient Land Mapping Tool 

 FEMA National Flood Hazard Map 

 Saco Watershed Collaborative Map 

To explore how our work connects to other Plans developed by our conservation partners, check out:

 NH Forest Action Plan 

 NH Wildlife Action Plan 

 Saco Headwaters Resource Monitoring Report  (Saco Headwaters Alliance)

 Saco Watershed Collaborative Action Plan 

 Lakes Region Strategic Conservation Plan  (Society for the Protection of NH Forests)