Nicholas Holland: Before founding LSI, Nick was Mass Audubon's Conservation Easement Stewardship Specialist. He developed policies and procedures for all aspects of conservation restriction stewardship including baseline documentation and monitoring. Nick created baseline documentation reports for each of Mass Audubon's 75 conservation restrictions based on field work, registry research and interviews with grantors, landowners and land protection staff, and then conducted multiple monitoring visits on each of these properties. This experience gave him the chance to refine Mass Audubon's baseline documentation report procedures and standards to make the reports more effective for monitoring field work.
While at Mass Audubon, Nick was principally responsible for drafting The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs Conservation Restriction Stewardship Training Manual to guide the stewardship work of agency staff and volunteers. He was subsequently involved in redrafting this manual to create the Massachusetts Conservation Restriction Stewardship Manual: A Handbook for Land Trusts and Conservation Commissions.
At Audubon, Nick helped to oversee a contract to prepare baseline documentation reports on 57 conservation restrictions held by the Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Department of Fish and Game. He left Mass Audubon in 2005 to devote full time to LSI.
Nick is a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (Masters of Forestry, 2001), and gained experience in aerial photograph interpretation, boundary location and marking, wetlands delineation, stand mapping, forest inventory, timber marking and road layout as a member of the Forest Crew at the 8,000-acre Yale Myers Forest in Connecticut and other school forests. Nick and his wife Debe own and manage some 2,400 acres of timberland in Vermont and New Hampshire. In 2008, he was one of two peer reviewers of the Land Trust Alliance's Caring for Land Trust Properties standards and practices curriculum released in 2008.
