Land Conservation

Preserving your land is more than a strategy; it’s a vision. Traditional approaches to land conservation are no longer sufficient as development pressures persist and climate change impacts surge. An increasingly fragmented landscape creates isolated pockets of wilderness suppressing the natural movement and growth of flora and fauna. Recognizing that this trend will result in the collapse of significant ecosystems, land trusts and nonprofits, private landowners, and government agencies are working in the northeast and across the country to preserve open space.

Our Land Conservation team understands the challenges facing the land trust community. For decades, land trusts have successfully preserved open space across New York State. However, now more than ever, our clients and legal team must pursue innovative approaches to achieve land conservation.

Various techniques are being employed with urgency throughout the northeast to combat the disappearing wetlands, forests and farmland. New alliances as well as aggressive and creative strategies toward open space preservation are becoming the norm within the land conservation community.

As the leading legal team for the land trust community in New York, we continuously evaluate these new partnerships and innovative land preservation policies to effectively support our clients’ goals. We provide our clients with effective legal counsel to facilitate and complete agreements and/or land transactions under tight deadlines and high internal ambitions.

In addition to transactional and legal strategic support, our team provides litigation leadership to preserve our clients’ interests with regard to conservation easements and/or other means of establishing legal rights and property interests related to land conservation. Our commitment is not only to the protection of real property interests, but also to addressing the evolving challenges of land conservation, ensuring the responsible and sustainable preservation of our valuable resources.

The Land Conservation lawyers at Rupp Pfalzgraf concentrate in these areas:

• Administrative Law
• Agriculture Support
• Conservation Easements & Land Protection
• Contract Review
• Land Trust Policy Standards & Best Practices
• Land Trust Operational Support
• Land Use, Planning & Zoning
• Litigation
• Municipal Law
• Real Estate Transactions
• Real Property Disputes
• Regulatory Compliance
• Title Review