How Conserve.org works

Here is the donation process: 1. Select an acre of land to connect with a conservation non-profit that is fundraising to conserve that land. Learn about the details of the conservation type and process. 2. 100% of your donation is sent to the non-profit via a secure online payment system called PayPal. 3. Your donation is restricted to land purchase. 4. A credit card fee will not be deducted from your donation, this is funded by Conserve. 5. The conservation non-profit will email you a tax deduction receipt. You may request a paper receipt letter. 6. Funding for Conserve.org site maintenance comes from the volunteers and friends of the site.

Purpose

Conserve.org provides a way for people to conserve land acre by acre. The acre can be gifted in the name of family, friends or in one’s own name as a legacy action. The donor is provided images and the latitude and longitude coordinates to visit the land. Partnering non-profits identify areas of high biodiversity or unique wilderness around the world that are ideal for conservation purchase. They develop a plan for a cost-effective purchase and long-term conservation management before making the acreage available for purchase on this Conserve.org website. Through these global and local non-government organizations, we enable people to support on-the-ground conservation.

Matching funds

Every donation receives a 100% match from Conserve.org. The total amount (the donation plus the match) is used to purchase the acre of land in your name or in the name that you specify. The legal costs, title costs, administrative and travel costs, and the credit card processing fee, is paid for by the local non-profit partner. The acre has been pre-purchased, often within the preceding six months, so it is dedicated the moment that you push “Buy,” and it is conserved in the name you input. The fiscal energy from your donation is thereby advanced to support the purchase of the next conservation location. Donations create the perpetuation of this project.

Tax deduction

The donation is 100% tax deductible. After making the donation, you will receive a letter by email that states the donation amount and that it is tax deductible. If you would like a paper receipt, you may write and request one. The email will come from the conservation non-profit listed on the acre-page as the partner for the project.

What is Conserve.org

Conserve.org is a publishing arm which shares images. It is a site whose aim is to visually connect people with landscapes they may want to keep wild. It is a volunteer-based organization and the funds needed to run it have been donated by volunteers and their surrounding families. Everyone on the team has other day-jobs and we do this as a passion project. Conserve.org connects donors to projects. It does not receive or hold money from donors. Donations go directly to the conservation organization listed.

Land selection

There are general criteria for the projects with which we partner. An important consideration is leverage – how large of an impact can a dollar have? That said, we also focus on locations that support large-scale land conservation efforts, that work with intact environments, and that support connectivity and migration. Each location must have an accessible cost per acre and harbor a diversity of critically endangered wildlife. The acreage viewed on this website was identified by local partners as available for outright purchase and your support will ensure the immediate protection of natural landscape in perpetuity.

Conservation management

The funds donated through Conserve.org pay for the acreage. The costs for long-term management, whether that be legal, ranger patrols, removal of fencing or structures and so on, is donated by the partner organization or foundation grants. We engage locations that have pre-arranged management structures, and this management often varies based on the location. We conserve locations which are primarily intended for reproduction of species. The links for the local organization that we have partnered with for each location describes their specific management approach; please refer to the About This Land page for more information on the purchase history of the acreage.

Transparency

Conserve.org supports land conservation through visual images. 100% of funds go to the purchase of acreage. Funds to operate the website and pay the credit card fees are provided by separate private donations. Conserve (DBA) is a 501c3 with the EIN 83-1293663.

Team

Haley Mellin

Conservation and Graphics

Haley is a painter and land conservationist. She works to conserve production habitat for endangered or endemic species and migration connectivity, all the while supporting locally-led conservation. She volunteers on Conserve.org to provide tangible and accessible conservation opportunities to the public. Haley founded Art into Acres, a non-profit that supports land conservation from the arts and culture community. Haley has a PhD from New York University in Visual Culture and Education and a Bachelor's Degree in Art Practice and Education from U.C. Berkeley.


Demid Nikitin

Software Engineer

Demid graduated from Physical Technical School in 2000 and started working as a front end developer, joining a company developing ajax based web applications in June 2001. He continued improving his skills, learning new techniques, approaches, and working with mainstream libraries. Demid worked with php, asp, java, recently kotlin and scala, bigdata and related technologies while developing his front end abilities with javascript, typescript and angular. Demid likes driving in the summer from Saint Petersburg to southern Russia, looking at the forests and fields, during both day and night. He likes backpacking in the forests, lakes and mountain rivers under the stars. He is currently learning Wing Chun.


Sammy Owen

Programmer

Sammy is a self taught software engineer volunteering here and there with conserve.org to expand his knowledge of climate issues and what conservation efforts can accomplish when the web meets real-world climate change mitigation. Interests include public land access and conservation, carbon sequestration, renewable energy abundance, web/tech ethics, and climate change education. Prior to coding he worked in visual/musical arts industries.


Adrianne Ramsey

Communications

Adrianne Ramsey is an independent curator, writer, and arts editor. She has organized exhibitions for Root Division, Berkeley Art Center, and USC Roski Galleries, and is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of GIRLS Magazine, an online publication that interviews femme-identifying contemporary artists, art professionals, curators, and writers about art, politics, and their individual practices. Her writing on contemporary art and culture has appeared in several publications and exhibition catalogues. She is also the Director of Communications of Art Into Acres, a non-profit environmental, art, and land conservation initiative, and is an MA Candidate in Curatorial Practices at the University of Southern California.


Aaron Sullivan

Software Engineer

Aaron is a maintainer for Conserve.org. He has a B.S. in Theoretical Mathematics, is a noted hand percussionist, and has created a lifestyle that allows him ample time wandering around in nature. He lives for the beautiful, calm moments he remembers to focus on his experience out in natural land. Aaron prioritizes easy living, preferring to spend days by the river playing music than grinding away in the city. He tends to find magic and connection everywhere he goes.


Victoria Velazco y Trianosky

Volunteer

Victoria is a senior at Flintridge Preparatory School in Los Angeles, California. She enjoys engaging in environmental work and is co-president of her school’s environmental club, Happy Trees. She enjoys viewing art and doing art as well and hopes to double major in Art History and Environmental Studies. She has helped by conducting user interviews among her peers, helping to improve and get a high school student’s perspective on the website. She has input some of her own ideas for the website as well. Victoria hopes to continue volunteering with Conserve for many more years to come.


Past volunteers


Benjamin Goering

Engineering Advisor

Benjamin started his career at age 19, moving to San Francisco and serving for 6 years as a Founding Engineer and Product Manager at Livefyre, a real-time commenting and social media aggregation platform. As an Invited Expert in the W3C Social Web Working Group, he helped refine the ActivityStreams 2.0 social data vocabulary and ActivityPub federated social networking protocol, and created distbin.com as the first implementation of ActivityPub. As bengo.co, he works with nonprofits and startups to build new features, scale cloud architectures, and adopt continuous deployment best practices. In 2018, he founded Permanent.Company to build a cloud platform community that everyday people can use to replace proprietary web apps with open source alternatives. Benjamin is motivated by making free, sustainable technology & communities accessible to everyone.


Vaidas Lamanauskas

Designer

Vaidas is a designer based in Lithuania working as a visual partner across branding, publication and digital projects. For the last few years he has been collaborating with people and international organizations on non-profit work related to the environment, education, the digital humanities, health, arts and culture. His partners and clients have included, most notably, the United Nations, World Wide Fund For Nature and Blue Sphere Foundation. Vaidas believes that art and media are essential tools to spark curiosity and inspire action, and it is therefore an integral part of everything he does. He’s been fortunate enough to visit some of the most biodiverse countries in the world where he witnessed first hand the sheer significance of fighting to protect wildlife and wild places around the world for generations to come.


Shayna McClelland

Press Consultant

Shayna McClelland is a communication and brand strategist based in New York. She collaborates with organizations on non-profit work related to the environment, animal welfare, and sustainable practices in the arts. Her clients have included the Honolulu Biennial, Humane Society of the United States, Global Wildlife Conservation and MoMA P.S.1. Her interests and work have taken her around the world, where she enjoys surfing, quiet mountain hikes and visiting local animal sanctuaries. Shayna earned a Master’s Degree in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London.


Joe Mellin

Product Designer

Joe is an eighth-generation Californian with entrepreneurial roots. He grew up performing community service and local natural town beautification projects, as well as founding his first business ventures and writing a book on entrepreneurism by age 12. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree at U.C. Berkeley and a Masters Degree in Design Thinking at Stanford University, and currently works at Microsoft. Having hiked, biked and camped around the United States and Europe, Joe has a passion for natural wilderness and its conservation. He is also a big fan of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School.


Mike Roth

Product Advisor

Mike is an entrepreneur and a leader at heart. By twenty-five, he had a BS in aviation technology and computer science and a decade of web development and technical leadership experience. Through his company Many Uses, Mike applies the skills he has accumulated over the years to help startups and small enterprises ship products and get to revenue or their next funding round. Driven by his values, Mike seeks out opportunities to work with organizations that make a positive impact on the planet and one another. Mike is currently taking the lead on a collaborative effort between Red Mtn Scientific and Conserve to develop drone-based image collection and analysis software–the culmination of which will streamline data collection efforts needed to make land conservation accessible and impactful.


Partner Organizations

Thank you to Patagonia, for supporting early development, to Earthrise, for their design and scale direction, to Google Non-Profit, for 360 camera support, and to Red Mountain Scientific for creating the SCALAR app for drone photography and for the technical support. Conserve is glad to partner with Digital & Stone memorials and Climate Action Now.

Image Credits

Image Credits: Guatemala: Dr. Chris Jordan (homepage landscape image), Dr. Phil Tanimoto (video and insect images), Elias Barrera (360 panoramas). Oregon: Brent Fenty (homepage landscape, drone video, 360 panoramas, species), USFWS (Greater Sage Grouse), J. Austin (Burrowing Owl), Jerry Kirkhart (Long-billed Curlew), Greg Burke (California Bighorn Sheep), United States Bureau of Land Management (Pygmy Rabbit).

How it works

Transparency

You are supporting the cost of land purchase. Related costs in the conservation process, such as staffing, property taxes, research and management support are donated by fellow partners and donors.

Legacy Act

Purchased land is conserved, entered into a land trust and managed in perpetuity via collaborations between local NGOs and government agencies.

Tax Deductible

Your funding is matched by non-profits and go 100% to the locally-led purchase of acreage for permanent conservation. Be it one or many acres, 100% of your donation is tax-deductible.

This site supports the permanent conservation of large-scale landscapes.