The BC Lands In Trust Registry was originally initiated to track Conservation Covenants since they became a legal tool available for conservation purposes in 1995 by the province of BC. Consequently, the Land Trust Alliance of BC determined that a full inventory of conservation lands should include sites also owned by Land Trusts & Conservancies in Fee Simple. The BC Lands in Trust Registry, with its database inventory program (The Protected Lands Catalogue), offers a central location for this inventory offering detailed information about protected areas on private lands - their ecoystems, habitats, species, cultural or aesthetic features and their land uses.
The information presented within this site has been collected from the Land Trust and Conservancy organizations which are currently members of the Land Trust Alliance of British Columbia LTABC. Data is being compiled through the use of the "Protected Lands Catalogue" (PLC) software. The PLC is a database program created by the LTABC, designed to collect protected area information from its members, as well as to index the related documentation that accompanies these conservation agreements. The PLC's first release in early 2001, provided the LTABC with most of the data from its members, and the second version of the PLC has just been released with improved functionality, including the ability to register species at risk in a protected area.
The Goal of this Site
By presenting this information online, we hope to provide our members and the public with an up to date reference of what private lands are currently being protected in BC. By using a mapping interface, we hope that users will be able to find the information which they are looking for easily, and within a context that holds significance as to the values of these protected sites.
You will notice that the navigational maps for this site also include data coverages of Parks in BC. This data coverage was acquired through several sources (see support link at left), and we hope to be able to keep these coverages as up-to-date as possible. By having federal, provincial and some municipal parks as an overlay theme, we can compare the location of the protected private lands with those designated as parkland. By doing this, we hope to more clearly see the significance of the areas already protected, as well as to determine which areas are not protected by either means, and that may benefit from added protection efforts (e.g. habitat corridors).
