PALTA

The Pennsylvania Land Trust Association has released the 2015 Pennsylvania Land Trust Census Report, which  highlights the accomplishments of land trusts’ conservation work in Pennsylvania (as of 12/31/2015) and includes the latest land trust rankings.

Please download the full report here. 

The biennial census found that, in Pennsylvania between January 2006 and December 2015, land trusts:

• conserved 223,000 acres* of land—348 square miles—roughly the area of Lehigh (or Lawrence) County;
• conserved, on average, 61 acres per day (a square mile every ten-and-a-half days);
• increased the acreage protected by conservation easements by 64%;
• increased the acreage owned in fee by land trusts by a whopping 112%; and
• increased by 26% the land transferred to governments for parks, gamelands, and other public conservation and recreational purposes.

In 2014 and 2015 alone, Pennsylvania land trusts protected 59 square miles of land, an area larger than the City of Pittsburgh.

This and past PALTA censuses have identified 89 private charitable organizations with a continuing commitment to conservation that have completed conservation real estate transactions in Pennsylvania.