Counting Acres in Landscape (Advanced Counting)
'How many acres do we hold?' is a very different question for some organizations than 'How many acres have we protected over the years?'. There are also scenarios like: if a property is protected in Fee, then later we protect it with an Easement, how do we say that both are 40 acres without saying we've protected 80 acres? In other words, how can you avoid double-counting overlapping interests?
In most cases, you can simply enter the number of acres of a property and allow the advanced counting features to work automatically. You can then use property status to answer questions like 'How many acres are we working on protecting' (Status = Active) or 'How many acres have we assisted in the protection of' (Status = Partner Holding). However, by understanding how the various acres fields function in Landscape, you can ensure that you are always retrieving accurate numbers when complex scenarios arise.
In most cases when tallying up total acres (often from Data Viewer), you want to limit your data to property records only or records tagged as stewardship sites (as long as your stewardship sites don't overlap). If you simply run a total of all portfolio records in Landscape, you are likely to double or even triple-count acres. Landscape has no built-in function to avoid these accidental double counts.
Starting Acres is in the 'General Details' of a parcel and property record. Starting acres exists to allow you to capture the original size of a record, if it is ever subject to a change like a partial disposition or amendment that adds acres. Starting acres is available in views and reports as 'Original Size'.
Current Acres is the current size of the interest that is held by you or a partner. This can be different from the original size if the interest was amended or partially disposed of. If you dispose of a property or parcel, the current size will be set to '0'.
Conservation Size (Properties only) is the number of acres protected, and is independent from the status of the property. Sometimes this will differ from the 'current acres' if, for example, you don't wish to count the number of acres in a development zone or building envelope. Only properties have this field.
Conservation Count (Properties only) is how many properties you want to count the record as, in order to answer the question 'how many properties have we protected?'.
Let's look at some examples:
1) A simple conservation easement (Property A) that protects 40 acres.
Starting Acres = 40
Current Acres = 40
Conservation Size = 40
Conservation Count = 1
2) You acquire the fee interest (Property B) in that same property, but continue to hold the easement (Property A). This would be represented by adding a new property record for the new fee interest, and then adding both to the same (new) group so you could see that they were related. More on these scenarios here.
Property A (Easement)
Starting Acres = 40
Current Acres = 40
Conservation Size = 40
Conservation Count = 0/1 (depending on whether you'd like to double-count the overlapping interests)
Property B (Fee)
Starting Acres = 40
Current Acres = 40
Conservation Size = 0
Conservation Count = 0/1 (depending on above)
A query on total 'Current Acres' of all properties would return 80 acres. This is correct, as it's the total acres that you currently hold. However, a query on 'Conservation Size' would return 40, which is probably what you want, so as not to erroneously state that there are 80 acres protected by your organization.