Most conservation easements have a list of allowed activities which require approval or notification of the easement holder. The 'Rights and Approvals' section under a Stewardship Site's 'Status' tab can be used to keep tabs on these rights, as well as activities pertaining to them.
There are two parts to every 'Rights and Approval' record: The reserved right description and the activity (or activities) associated with that right. Click on the plus button next to 'Rights & Approvals' to create a new record.
As an example, suppose a landowner has a reserved right to build two additional agricultural structures with the approval of the easement holder. The entry for that right would look something like this:
The available 'Types' of Reserved Rights can be defined by you in Settings > List Items > Stewardship Sites > Available Rights Types (must be an Administrator to access settings).
The 'Exercise Requirement' is set to 'Approval', since this activity requires approval from your organization. Note that there are two other options available: 'Notification', meaning you're supposed to be notified of the intention to exercise the right; and 'Nothing', meaning the landowner has no obligation to report activities surrounding the right to you.
The Exercise Limit in this case is '2' because the landowner has the right to exercise the right twice. If the limit is set to '1', then the Activity header disappears when a new activity is added. The Exercise Limit number determines how many 'Activity' entries you can have before Landscape alerts you that the owner has reached their allowable limit.
Click on the '+' button next to 'Activity' to add a new activity associated with the reserved rights record. This Activity record is a place to capture the narrative around your organization's response to a request to exercise a reserved right. You'll be taken to the request editor (or in the case of a 'notification' or 'nothing' reserved right, the exercise editor):
Enter the necessary information. Then click the 'back' button to return to the reserved rights editor.
Entering Reserved Rights with no Exercise Limits
A reserved right with no exercise limit (forestry is a common one) can be entered with '999' as the upper limit. Users can then enter as many activities as they need to:
Entering Forbidden Uses
The Requests & Approvals section can also be used to capture expressly forbidden uses. Simply enter the reserved rights record as an 'Approval' and set the exercise limit to '0'. Be clear in the name and description that the activity is not allowed.
Creating Rights & Approvals from Issues
It can often be the case that an issue discovered during a monitoring visit or otherwise and entered into Landscape under the 'Issues' section will transform into a Rights & Approvals record. There is a built-in way to do this by clicking the check box to the left of the issue and then selecting the exclamation point button that appears:
A new Rights & Approvals record appears in the list, with information loaded from the issue entry:
Summarizing Rights & Approvals Records
As with any record in Landscape, you can use Views and Reports to summarize the data that you want in the format that you want. The 'Stewardship Site Report' template (available for download from this article) has a nice way of summarizing available data from the Rights & Approvals section:
The 'Comprehensive Property Report' also displays information from Rights & Approvals.
To make a view of existing Rights & Approvals, start with a Stewardship Site view, and then expand into Rights & Approvals. You can then filter based on type/status/etc.:
More on expanding and filtering Views here.
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