Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation Easements

Easements represent parcels of agricultural land and woodland preserved for food and fiber production in Maryland since 1977. Landowners voluntarily sell easements through a competitive statewide process. The dataset includes easement boundaries estimated from property descriptions and aligned with Maryland parcel data.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the spatial distribution and total acreage of preserved farmland by county using the 'County' and 'Settled Acres' columns.
• Tracking the timeline of easement settlements and program activity over time using the 'Settled Date' field.
• Integrating Maryland easement data with national protected lands databases using PAD-US standard fields like 'Source Protected Area ID' and 'Category'.
• Linking to detailed program information for specific easements via the provided 'Weblink' attribute.

Strengths

• Data spans a long-term state program active since 1977, providing historical context.
• Dataset is structured to integrate with the national Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) via standardized fields added in June 2019.

Limitations

• Easement boundaries are estimates aligned to parcel polygons and are explicitly not suitable for legal surveys, as coordinates do not represent legal boundaries.
• Historical records may lack complete data for newer PAD-US fields, as noted in the source description.
• No row count, file size, or specific column list is provided across the sources, limiting assessment of data volume and structure.

Provenance

Source

State of Maryland, Maryland Department of Planning.

Collection Method

Easement boundaries are estimated based on property descriptions from the Maryland Department of Agriculture, aligned to MD iMap parcel polygons, and supplemented with MdProperty View data.

Time Range

1977 to present

Freshness

2026-04-05

Geography

State of Maryland, USA