Open Space
Room to Breathe
View of Henderson Lake, Tahawus Tract
acrylic by Lauryn Kashdan-Schrom
Open space plays an important role in our state's landscape: the patterns of development, economy, culture, environment and well-being of our people. When our nation was young, the notion of open space conservation would have seemed unusual. The country was predominantly rural and agrarian; human settlements were often surrounded by wilderness and people were directly dependent on our state's fields, forests and waterways.
Urban Parkland
Working Landscapes
As our nation advanced, we largely abandoned firsthand relationships with the land, while spreading the landscape with homes, neighborhoods, commercial development and infrastructure. Now, as undeveloped land becomes scarce in many communities, it has become clear that there are basic human needs that go unmet without open space. In modern times, open space conservation requires active participation by government and citizens to ensure that these needs are met.
Open space provides:
- Preservation of areas of particular scenic beauty, cultural value and historic significance
- Room for production of food and forest products
- Room for outdoor recreation
- Green infrastructure to shape urban growth and provide a more livable and efficient urban environment
- Protection or restoration of ecological functions
- Protection of wildlife diversity and habitat for endangered plant and animal species
- Protection of fisheries, and ecotourism potential
- Mitigation of natural hazards, such as flooding, and protection of water supplies
- Values that can take decades or centuries to mature and can be quickly lost to new development.
Definition of Open Space
Open space may be defined as an area of land or water that either remains in its natural state or is used for agriculture, free from intensive development for residential, commercial, industrial or institutional use. Open space can be publicly or privately owned. It includes agricultural and forest land, undeveloped coastal and estuarine lands, undeveloped scenic lands, public parks and preserves. It also includes water bodies such as lakes and bays. The definition of open space depends on the context. In a big city, a vacant lot or a small marsh can be open space. A small park or a narrow corridor for walking or bicycling is open space, though it may be surrounded by developed areas. Cultural and historic resources are part of the heritage of New York State and are often protected along with open space.
Alder Bottom Wildlife Management Area
NYS Open Space Conservation Plan
The Open Space Plan is required by law to be revised every three years. The current plan was updated in 2006.
New York's Open Space Conservation Plan serves as the blueprint for the State's land conservation efforts, which during the past several years, has conserved over a million acres of land with an investment of more than $762 million.
The Open Space Plan contains: a description of programs and policies that affect the conservation of the State's open space resources; major conservation successes accomplished under the plan; a list of priority projects; evaluation and criteria used to determine Environmental Protection Fund (EPF) spending priorities; and recommendations by the Regional Advisory Committee, local governments and partnerships, the public, and staff from DEC, the Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) and the Department of State (DOS), to improve New York's open space conservation program.
The Goals of the State Open Space Conservation Plan are:
To protect our State's water quality, including the quality of surface and underground drinking water supplies and the quality of lakes, streams and coastal and estuarine waters needed to sustain aquatic ecosystems and water-based recreation.- To provide high quality outdoor recreation, on both land and water, accessible to all our State's citizens regardless of where they live, how much money they have, or their physical abilities.
- To protect and enhance those scenic, historic and cultural resources which are readily identifiable as valued parts of the common heritage of New York's citizens.
- To protect habitat for the diversity of plant and animal species to ensure the protection of healthy, viable and sustainable ecosystems, as well as the conservation and preservation of biological diversity within our State.
- To protect habitat to sustain and enhance populations of endangered species, threatened species and species of special concern.
- To protect habitat to sustain the traditional pastimes of hunting, fishing, trapping and wildlife viewing.
- To maintain the critical natural resource-based industries of farming, forest products, commercial fishing and tourism.
- To provide places for education and research on ecological, environmental and appropriate cultural resources to provide a better understanding of the systems from which they derive.
- To preserve open space, particularly forest lands, for the protection and enhancement of air quality.
- To use open space conservation as a tool to combat global climate change by sequestering carbon, encouraging more compact community design patterns, and expanding the tree canopy in urban centers and communities to reduce energy consumption.
Smart Growth
A relatively compact pattern of development
Smart growth is an approach to land use that redirects economic growth away from undeveloped areas and back into established communities. Open space conservation and smart growth go hand in hand, just as the natural and built environments are interconnected. On one hand, open space conservation redirects growth by preventing development on protected land. At the same time, smart growth draws development pressure away from unprotected open spaces.
More about Open Space:
- 2006 NYS Open Space Conservation Plan - The 2006 Open Space Conservation Plan serves as the blueprint for the State's land conservation efforts.
- Smart Growth - The Department encourages the use of Smart Growth principles to guide economic growth away from the open space periphery and toward traditionally developed areas.
- Environmental Protection Fund - The New York State Environmental Protection Fund provides mechanisms for open space conservation and land acquisition.
- Recent Land And Conservation Easement Announcements and Acquisitions - The Bureau of Real Property is DEC's Real Estate Agent, handling all land conveyance transactions for all DEC Divisions. This page lists recent land and conservation easement announcements and acquisitions.
- New York State Conservation Partnership Program - New York State Conservation Partnership Program - Capacity building grants for land trusts in New York State.
- Open Space Conservation Successes - photo gallery and descriptions of some open space conservation successes
- Open Space Conservation License Plate - New York's conservation license plate helps conserve open space.
