Tough economic times have been a bonanza for land trusts and nonprofit conservation groups, which have recently been buying rights to California redwood groves, beaches, oak savannahs and timberland at a feverish pace.

The shopping spree has resulted in the preservation of hundreds of thousands of acres of the state's most pristine and picturesque landscapes at a time when the country is slopping around in an economic wallow.

The bargain prices from land investors and developers trying to get out of failed housing projects and real estate deals are among the very few positives in a debt-ridden state, where parks, preserves and historic sites are being shuttered and home and property foreclosures are occurring with disturbing regularity.

"The bright spot is that there are opportunities that we haven't seen before, with lands on the market that are priorities for conservation," said Brent Handley, the western division transaction director for the San Francisco's Trust for Public Land. "And there are prices that we haven't seen before. We're looking at values that have decreased 50 or 60 percent since 2007."

Land acquisitions

The trust purchased 530 acres of oak woodlands and 2 miles of river in the Sierra foothills near Marysville in September and transferred it to the California Department of Fish and Game for permanent protection. The chaparral-covered land, which was once owned by the Excelsior Mining Co., had been scheduled to be bulldozed for homes, but the trust swooped it up for $3.5 million after the bottom dropped out of the economy.

Handley said his organization also recently bought Bruin Ranch, a 1,773-acre oak woodland in the same area for $9.5 million. The land was on sale for $30 million in 2006. The trust has also agreed to pay $610,000 for 47.5 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains that was valued at $1.2 million four years ago.

San Francisco's Save the Redwoods League, the Sonoma Land Trust and other nonprofits around the Bay Area have also recently signed deals that will preserve in perpetuity giant swaths of open space and forest.

"There is just no market for development right now, so investors are looking to put their money someplace else, and this is happening across the West," Handley said. "We are actively working in the Bay Area and in Southern California with numerous owners looking for opportunities for conservation on their lands."

Easement benefits

Not all of the preserved land is changing hands. Hard economic times have opened up a new dynamic in environmental protection whereby preservation groups are buying easements that require the land owners to restore habitat and refrain from development.

These conservation easements allow ranchers to keep ranching and timber companies to keep logging as long as they use environmentally sustainable techniques and the land is preserved.

"The old way was trying to buy these lands and make them into parks," said Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust, which is based in San Francisco. "If you use a conservation easement instead, you can protect those public trust values for far less money than if you bought the whole thing."

The forest trust and Roseburg Resources Co. obtained a $7.8 million grant this month from the California Wildlife Conservation Board to buy a conservation easement on 8,230 acres of forested watershed along Bear Creek on the flanks of Mount Shasta. The easement will restore and preserve 950 acres of sensitive forest habitat, old-growth trees and marshland.

Logging continues

The owners will get an infusion of money and still be allowed to employ loggers and harvest timber sustainably, a boon for an area that has been hard hit by the collapse of the once-thriving lumber industry.

"This easement will protect clean water and habitat and create jobs in a way that you could never do if you took it out of private hands and turned it into a park," Wayburn said. "Ten years ago, timber companies were highly skeptical of these kinds of deals. Now, every single company in this state is looking at this and saying, 'This could make sense for me.' "

The Trust For Public Land recently purchased a conservation easement on 150 acres known as the Black Swan Diggings, a series of ponds on a former mining claim in the Sierra foothills where a wide variety of turtles, frogs, egrets, herons, woodpeckers and other birds congregate.

A big deal

One of the biggest deals this year was by the Conservation Fund, a national nonprofit, which purchased a $20 million conservation easement preventing development in the 49,678-acre Usal Redwood Forest, next to the rugged Lost Coast north of Fort Bragg. That deal, which allows the nonprofit Redwood Forest Foundation to use profits from logging to pay for habitat restoration, also included the purchase by Save the Redwoods League of a uniquely twisted stand of old-growth "candelabra" redwoods.

The cheaper conservation easements are useful now that most state and federal funding has dried up. Philanthropists and private foundations have also tightened their belts, forcing buyers to sometimes recruit between six and eight funding partners.

"We're certainly much more creative, and we have to search much harder for all the potential funds," Handley said.

The availability of land is nevertheless a unique opportunity that, he said, conservation organizations, nonprofit trusts and foundations must seize.

"There have been huge acquisitions by land trusts in the last couple of years and certainly many of the land trusts, like the Trust for Public Land, have been willing to acquire the land and hold it until funds are available," Handley said. "When a priority parcel is available, that is the time to acquire it regardless of what seems to be bad timing for the agencies and their budgets."