Properties, Parcels, and Stewardship Site Organization (Infographic)

A Property represents the interest your organization holds on a piece of land. It can hold details like interest, value, or acquired on date. A property almost always has just a single interest (Fee / Conservation Easement / etc.):

A Property record is made up of one or more parcels.  A parcel is one or more geographic units that make up a Property, and holds information like Address, Legal Description, and is also what is associated with Contacts:

A Stewardship Site is a way of tracking what happens on those parcels like Site Visits, Issues, and Uses.  Stewardship Sites are their own unit because very often organizations will combine or separate parcels from different properties for the purpose of management.  A Stewardship Site can therefore be:

1. One Property, which, in turn is just one parcel, as in Property & Stewardship Site 3
2. Multiple parcels, as in Property and Stewardship Site 1
   or
3. A single parcel (often subdivided) of a Property which has multiple parcels (Stewardship Site 2 below is made up of a subdivided parcel as well as another parcel from another property). 

Another way to think about what comprises a Stewardship Site, and the way many organizations organize them is by ownership.  In the illustration above, parcel 1A and 1B would have the same owner, as would Parcels 1C and 2A, and Parcel 3A.  Of course, this is also contingent on other factors like geographic contiguousness and shared restrictions, and how you choose to group your Stewardship Sites is completely up to you.

Land deals are often complex, and this structure is set up to allow you to capture your transactions accurately. Check out this article for more on managing complex interests.

"But what about Landscape Projects?"

A Project in Landscape is a way of organizing Tasks (to-do items), Funding, and Budgets around one or multiple Properties and Stewardship Sites.  By organizing a Project around a Property, for example, you can create a to-do list for the acquisition of the Property and track budget items.  Alternatively, some organizations use the built in task functions of Projects to track monitoring on their Stewardship Sites.  For more on Projects, click here.