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'Here we're talking about preservation,' said Ridge Schuyler of The Nature Conservancy, who photographed different tributaries and other areas of use. View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

Documenting the riverfront

City, easement holders assess condition of Fredericksburg's riverfront land and like most of what they see

Date published: 6/7/2006

By EMILY BATTLE

River maps, global positioning units, cameras and coffee cups covered the long rectangular table at Friends of the Rappahannock's office off Fall Hill Avenue yesterday morning.

Four teams of officials from The Nature Conservancy, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, the Virginia Outdoors Foundation and the city of Fredericksburg were preparing to set out to take their first crack at documenting the condition of the more than 4,200 acres of riverfront land that Fredericksburg's City Council recently voted to put under permanent conservation easement.

A tentative closing date for the easement has been set for June 28, and before that, The Nature Conservancy must complete a full title report on the land upstream of the city and a baseline report on its condition.

After closing, The Nature Conservancy has two years to supplement that baseline report with more targeted research, including a new technology called LiDAR, which will give the city a detailed picture of the topography of the land, right down to the scars left by all-terrain vehicles and erosion.

But yesterday was more of a first look at the land from the water because public roads do not lead to most of the city's river holdings.

The Nature Conservancy split the rivers up into seven segments to make the review more manageable. Fredericksburg's easement runs along 331/2 miles of the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, and it includes another 32.2 miles of tributaries that feed into the river.

As they canoed four of the seven sections, the teams that went out yesterday had their eyes peeled for any sign of human encroachment on the land.

Ridge Schuyler, director of The Nature Conservancy's Piedmont Program, said the baseline study for Fredericksburg's river easement is a lot different from what the conservancy does for smaller easements on farms and other land parcels.

The point of a baseline report is to give the easement holder and the landowner a reference point from which to monitor changes to the land in the future.

With more traditional easements, the conservancy often goes out to document all the manmade features on the land--things such as buildings and roads.

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Date published: 6/7/2006