This Land is Your Land
Whether you’re visiting the Belgrade Lakes region for the weekend or you’re a lifelong resident, there’s a good chance you’ve driven past either a trailhead or areas of conserved land. Maine’s lakes region boasts a myriad of conserved land plots, including state-owned, owned by a land trust, or held under a conservation easement, and many are accessible for the public to enjoy.
7 Lakes Alliance is often thought of as a water protection organization, but it is also built on a long history of protecting the land, in addition to the water quality, of the Belgrade Lakes watershed. Conserved land provides a filter for the water running downhill to the lakes and streams. Nutrients and sediments disturbed by running water are caught by the roots of plants and trees before they can reach the lake, making the water in our lakes cleaner and safer.
7 Lakes Alliance received status as an accredited land trust in 2020, shortly after the Belgrade Regional Conservation Alliance and the Maine Lakes Resource Center merged to form 7 Lakes Alliance in 2017. Accreditation provides a national standard for land trusts that certifies sound land management and business practices, assuring affiliates and interested landowners of a land trust’s reputability. 7 Lakes now manages nearly 6,000 acres of land in and around the Belgrade Lakes region, both under conservation easements and direct ownership, called fee properties. A conservation easement creates an agreement between a land trust and a landown’er around a privately owned parcel, assuring its sustainable management or conservation. Each easement is unique to the property it protects, but all aim to permanently conserve valuable natural areas like agricultural fields, working forests, or old growth forests for the benefit of the public or the environment. The easements and fee properties that 7 Lakes Alliance currently holds, ensures those parcels’ sustainable management indefinitely.
So, how can you find this conserved land? The new interactive map on the 7 Lakes Alliance website contains a wealth of information about not only the conserved land we manage and the trails, but also each lake’s watershed, invasive plant and water quality monitoring sites, clean water act remediation projects, and more. Many of the 7 Lakes properties, new or old, are open to the public. Wherever you explore, please respect our natural places to conserve them for generations to come.
Brynne Robbins is outreach coordinator for the 7 Lakes Alliance.
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