The major institutional players in land conservation in Rhode Island are The Nature Conservancy, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Audubon Society, and the RI Department of Environmental Management. There has, however, been an rapid growth in the number of small, local conservation organizations, such as Land Trusts and conservation commissions, that are becoming effective agents in purchasing land for open space. The Rhode Island land conservation community is fortunate in having access to many sources of funds that are dedicated to purchasing land and these include state and local bonds, private Foundations, oil spill settlement funds, and monies specifically targeted for groundwater and wetlands protection. State, federal, and local conservationists are now in the position of having to decide which lands are most valuable for natural resource protection.

Many of the small municipal-based conservation organizations do not have ready access to the scientific data they need to objectively evaluate conservation value of potential properties they might acquire. Furthermore, they do not have the technical or ecological background to identify critical regions for protection. We have been working for four years in developing a simple analytical protocol that provide local conservation organizations guidance in identifying the most important lands for conservation. Our model is based on the premise that single-theme conservation prioritizing -- for example groundwater, wetland, biodiversity, or cultural resource criteria -- is good and appropriate for many conservation applications and transactions. However, all things being equal, any property that contain multiple resources has more value than properties that only contain a single resource. Therefore, areas in the community where we have high co-occurrence of natural and cultural resources are critically important targets for protection because they represent the most (economic) value for the conservation dollar.