The Virginia Land Conservation Foundation (Foundation or VLCF) serves an important land conservation mission in the Commonwealth. It leverages state funds through matching grants and partnerships to protect working farms and forests, historic lands, cultural resources, open space and parks, and natural areas. The Foundation’s distinctive features include a cross-cutting grant review process to maximize conservation values of funded projects, an inter-agency staff review team that involves expertise from multiple state agencies, and a final review by a diverse Board of Trustees whose membership includes appointees from the Governor, Speaker of the House of Delegates, and the Senate of Virginia.

Virginia Land Conservation Foundation

In fiscal year 2024, the state budget appropriated $16,000,000 for VLCF, with $4,000,000 of that appropriation going to the Virginia Outdoors Foundation’s Open Space Lands Preservation Trust Fund, pursuant to § 10.1-1020(C) of the Code of Virginia. Unspent and released funds from previous grant rounds totaled $2,672,683 and were added to the FY24 round, for a total of $14,672,673 in available VLCF grant funds. The Foundation received 40 proposals requesting approximately $20.6 million. The Board met on November 13, 2023, to award funding to 29 projects that propose to protect 55,575 acres. Details of these projects are provided starting on page 2.

Information regarding projects from past grant rounds and their funding amounts can be found in Appendix A of this report. Additional data reflecting the geographic distribution of these recent grant awards, and all prior projects can be found in Appendix B.

Since FY2000, total funds appropriated to the Foundation total $118.6 million (Table 1) and have resulted in the protection of 269,683 acres. To date, $90.4 million has been allocated to VLCF’s matching grant program. Additionally, more than $28.1 million has been allocated to the Virginia Outdoors Foundation (VOF) for the Open-Space Lands Preservation Trust Fund in accordance with Virginia Code § 10.1-1020(C)(1). Moneys from this Fund are used to aid localities acquiring open-space easements or landowners conveying open-space easements with the costs associated with the conveyance of the easements.

Since first receiving funding in FY2000, the Foundation has held 19 grant rounds. During those grant rounds, VLCF received 540 applications requesting more than $211 million in state funding, which was more than twice the available amount (Table 2). It is worth noting that in many cases, the total project cost far exceeds the amount requested. To date, VLCF has awarded funding to 356 of the 540 grant applications and awarded more than $102.1 million to land conservation projects to protect more than 154,990 acres, at an average cost to the Foundation of $659 per acre.

The Foundation met its charge to develop a strategic plan for the expenditure of moneys received from the Fund. The strategic plan governing fiscal expenditures has been incorporated into successive VLCF grant manuals beginning in 1999 and is updated regularly. The Board approved the most recent revisions to the grant manual at the May 16, 2023, meeting to establish the FY2024 grant round. The grant scoring criteria are outlined in Appendix C. The most current grant manual can be found at: www.dcr.virginia.gov/vlcf.

The Virginia Land Conservation Foundation serves as a coordinating mechanism for bringing together several state agencies’ land conservation efforts and priorities. The Foundation is one of the key tools that Virginia utilizes to attain its land conservation targets. A coordinating multi-agency task force consisting of the Director of the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), the Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the State Forester, the Director of the Department of Historic Resources, the Director of the Department of Wildlife Resources, and the Executive Director of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, or their designees, provide the VLCF Board with assistance on such matters as grant criteria, grant priorities, and grant selection. The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation serves as the lead staff for the Foundation.

The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Office of Land Conservation serves as a statewide central contact, repository, and clearinghouse for land conservation in Virginia. During VLCF grant rounds, this office serves as an important source of information for potential grant applicants and acts as the grant manager for projects funded.

The Office’s website ( https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/land-conservation/) and the Foundation’s website ( https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/vlcf) include a wide variety of land conservation materials and contact information to assist landowners, conservation organizations, and managers with their conservation planning. In addition, the state’s comprehensive statewide conserved lands resource mapping tool, Natural Heritage Data Explorer (NHDE), developed by DCR’s Division of Natural Heritage can be found here: https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/natural-heritage/nhdeinfo. This important and useful land conservation-planning tool is updated regularly.