Southern Madison Heritage Trust

Southern Madison Heritage Trust works to conserve, for public benefit, natural resources in and around the townships of Brookfield, Eaton, Hamilton, Lebanon and Madison in Madison County, N.Y. They strive to protect land, water, unique habitats, scenic landscapes, recreational sites and historic features through stewardship, public education and support of practices that advance natural resource conservation.

In the summer of 2007, Sam Torrey, '09, created a variety of information and education materials aimed at maximizing the educational and recreational value of the SMHT's Leland Reserve property. He created a series of informational articles about land trusts in general, SMHT, land conservation methods and tools, and current and future land conservation trends and issues in our area. These articles will be used for community outreach campaigns and on the organization's developing website.

In 2005, Katie Flood, '06, worked to create a natural resource database for the organization. Flood said,

"The SMHT is interested in having on hand a list of lands which area already under some sort of legal protection, as well as a list of lands which would be most valuable for future conservation efforts.  Because the SMHT is still very small, with limited resources, it is important for them to know which lands would be the most worthwhile to concentrate their efforts on, and hopefully the outcome of my project will do just that.  For example, the SMHT is interested in having an inventory of municipally owned lands, as well as lands under tax law 480-A, that are located within the six township study area of Georgetown, Eaton, Madison, Hamilton, Lebanon and Brookfield, because they feel land of this type is important to their efforts.  I am using GIS software to perform computer analysis on the data, as well as produce maps displaying different aspects of the data. Also GIS layer files will be created for all of the different attributes, so that with the click of a mouse desired characteristics can be displayed on a computer screen and subsequently used to produce visual maps. The data I have been given includes the Real Property Tax data for the six townships, satellite photography, land use classification data, and digital orthophotos, and I am also in contact with different town, county, and federal organizations in order to obtain further data. I will be adding this data to existing databases as well as creating new ones, and combining the existing data so that all useful information is readily accessible, and then can be easily displayed in several different formats. Essentially the output of my project will create reference files to aid future conservation efforts by the SMHT."