Executive Summary

The purpose of this research was to complete an inventory of open space in Colorado and to provide basic information about the status and trends of open space lands in Colorado. The overall goal of this report is to present findings of a statewide inventory of open space in Colorado. The need for this inventory has been expressed frequently over the past decade or so by a variety of groups and commissioned reports. Most recently Governor Owens asked the Great Outdoors Colorado Board (GOCO) to create a database of protected land, to provide better information to best protect open spaces. GOCO responded by approving a contract with CSU and Southpaw Consulting to produce an inventory built on the Colorado Ownership, Management and Protection (COMaP) project.

We developed the inventory through a structured process: first gathering and acquiring existing datasets from federal, state, and local governments and organizations and then, through targeted collection efforts to fill in data gaps. We contacted over 450 agencies and collected over 222 spatial datasets as well as spreadsheets with a variety of attribute information. These spatial datasets are typically available as ESRI shapefiles or geodatabases[1]. Other datasets were created at the Natural Resource Ecology Lab by digitizing legal descriptions available from County Clerk & Recorder’s offices. We also collected a variety of attributes associated with each protected parcel that help to track data about the agency that owns and/or manages the land, is public access allowed, the type of protection mechanism, etc. We specifically removed any information about the name of the private property owner from the publicly available datasets.

Please note that this inventory was designed to map only formally-conserved and protected lands. Privately-owned land provides additional ‘de facto’ open space, but such land is not included in the inventory because it has not been legally protected from development through conservation easement or sale to a public entity for open space use.

 

Summary of Results:

We found that 29,904,734 acres of Colorado have some form of protection by federal, state, local, or private conservation organizations:

 

·                    Local protection (city/county governments and land trusts) accounts for 1,780,856 acres (~3% of Colorado) (both fee and conservation easement).

·                    Lands protected by state agencies account for 3,237,575 acres (~5%)

·                    Federally owned lands account for 24,886,303 acres (~37%).

GOCO has helped fund roughly 460 projects across the state, protecting 551,127 acres:

·                    Roughly half of the acres involving GOCO projects have been to help conserve private lands

·                    ~13% (73,184 acres) on land trust owned lands

·                    Approximately 8% on local (city/county) government owned lands.

·                    A little more than half the acres have predominately protected agricultural lands, and slightly more than a third have protected natural area/wildlife habitat.

·                    Since 2000, the number of acres of land protected by conservation easements has more than doubled from the amount of protected lands before 2000.

 

Products Available:

·  COMaP V6 Geodatabase including final, edit, and overlap datasets. Symbology layer files. Technical document and metadata describing the COMaP process and content.

·  COMaP website displaying maps, reports and other supplementary COMaP information, www.nrel.colostate.edu/projects/comap

·  Maps of general ownership and management in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format for download.

·  Display of COMaP Geodatabase on the Colorado Division of Wildlife Natural Diversity Information Source interactive mapping website, www.ndis.nrel.colostate.edu

·  Downloadable Google Earth format (.kml) files to allow viewing of GOCO projects in Google Earth.

Please see the COMaP website for additional tables, maps, and documents of the Colorado open space inventory: www.nrel.colostate.edu/projects/comap/