OLC Receives the Land Trust Alliance National Land Trust Excellence Award

The Oblong Land Conservancy (OLC) is excited to announce that the Land Trust Alliance (LTA) has selected OLC and the Putnam County Land Trust to receive the Alliance’s National Land Trust Excellence Award for all-volunteer land trusts.  It is the first time this award will recognize all-volunteer trusts in New York State.

This award is presented in honor of the collaborative conservation work in The Great Swamp watershed, one of the three largest wetlands in New York State.  The wetlands cover some 6,700 acres and the uplands surrounding the swamp provide a watershed of approximately 62,500 upland acres.


Conservation of this natural resource is vital for a number of reasons:

• It provides the sole recharge facility for the aquifer that serves more than 40,000 people in the Watershed,
• It forms the headwaters of the Croton Reservoir System that provides New York City with some of its drinking water, and 
•  It provides critical habitat for a wide variety of flora and fauna, some of which are endangered.

This collaboration is an important initiative since it recognizes that conservation goes beyond the efforts of a single land trust, and has led to a collaboration with Friends of the Great Swamp (FrOGS) to implement strategies for awareness of, and land stewardship in, the Great Swamp Watershed.  It is one of 13 inter-state and inter-town partnerships happening in New York and Connecticut.  These land trusts and environmental groups recognize that together we can achieve much more than we can as individual organizations.

"Oblong Land Conservancy and Putnam County Land Trust epitomizes all we recognize in Excellence Award recipients," says Land Trust Alliance President Andrew Bowman.  "Through the highest caliber work, Oblong Land Conservancy and Putnam County Land Trust has broadened support for land conservation, built understanding and grown the conservation community."

We are honored to be receiving this award at the Alliance's Rally 2016: The National Land Conservation Conference on the evening of October 28, 2016 at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis.

For additional details please contact Theresa Ryan, Chair Oblong Land Conservancy (845) 855 5993.