Stewardship
Stewardship Workgroup
Over 100 landowners have already protected nearly 10,000 acres of land in Jefferson & Berkeley Counties. The Stewardship Workgroup develops outreach tools to engage existing easement holders in conversations about continuing to protect their land through conservation practices such as tree plantings along streams, livestock fencing around water sources, and more.
Accomplishments
Created a "BMP Toolkit" for easement monitors to use during annual monitoring trips and educate landowner about best management practices.
Meeting Notes
July 20th, 2020 - Voted to approve the BMP Toolkit (v1) via a digital survey. We consider this a first version that will be modified over time as we learn more about how implementation works in the field. We plan to host a training for easement monitors in August 2020 so that the toolkit can be incorporated into the fall/winter monitoring season beginning in October 2020. The toolkit consists or three documents:
Conservation Survey - short-form for carbon copy paper and long-form with program descriptions.
July 8th, 2020 - Meeting Notes. Met with intention of approving BMP Toolkit (short-form carbon-copy version of Conservation Survey; long-form with programs; and Educational Brochure). A full history of this conversation and our next steps provided in this document. Due to limited number of people on call, will make final determination via a digital survey.
May 26th, 2020 - Meeting Notes. Joint meeting with the Conservation Workgroup to discuss the BMP Toolkit, including the Conservation Survey and Educational Brochure. Our tentative plan is to make final revisions to these documents by July, schedule a training for easement monitors in August/September, and then implement when monitoring kicks off again in October 2020.
March 9th, 2020 - Meeting Notes. The group formerly changed our name to the "Stewardship Workgroup". Based on survey results, we updated our Conservation Survey and Educational Brochure. At our next meeting in May, we plan to finalize these two documents as our "BMP Toolkit" and work with the Conservation Workgroup to develop a workflow for implementation.
January 22nd, 2020 - Meeting Notes. The group discussed survey results on the first draft of our BMP Toolkit, comprised of a "decision matrix" for easement monitors to use during their annual monitoring visit, as well as an "educational brochure" for the landowners. We reviewed opportunities to improve these documents to discuss at our next meeting.
October 28th, 2019 - Meeting Notes. First official meeting of the BMP Workgroup. Discussed the best conservation practices for water quality. Developed a plan for developing BMP Toolkit.