Identifying potential corporate partners for habitat restoration

1. Research
2. Data
3. Processing
4. Result
5. Discussion
6. Next Steps

Habitat restoration can be expensive work. One way of making dollars go further is partnering with businesses that own land of interest to conservation: the business contributes money and access to their land, and the entity conducting restoration can achieve its goals.

Friends of the Mississippi River (FMR), a local nonprofit focused towards restoring and enhancing the environment in the watersheds around the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA), selectively partners with local businesses to manage their land in pursuit of conservation goals. How could FMR identify other businesses for similar parterships?

One way would be to generate a site suitability scheme for identifying areas ideal for conservation, then calculate which largest land parcels contain land that scores highly.

Fortunately, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has already generated a suitability scheme that could fit FMR's purposes. In pursuit of the DNR's conservation goals, they use the Marxan software to identify priority areas for protecting biological diversity and have published a layer of such areas for the whole state, which will be referred to here as "SNACOA".

But how to identify landowners? The easiest way is through parcel data. Fortunatley, the Metropolitan Council aggregates parcel data for the seven metro counties (Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, and Washington), which provides an effecient means of acquiring parcel data.

Accoring to FMR's "How we choose sites to protect and restore" page, FMR focuses their resources on the Twin Cities metropolitan area and "essential tributaries and lands that drain to the metro river". What this specifically means is ambiguous, but based on FMR's map of current restoration sites (see the "Protection and restoration sites" section), FMR generally limits their work areas to the seven metro counties and the six DNR Major Watersheds intersecting the MNRRA (Lower Minnesota River, Mississippi River - Lake Pepin/St. Cloud/Twin Cities, North Fork Crow River, and Rum River).

Accordingly, to identify only landowners in the seven metro counties with land of interest to FMR, the SNACOA can be clipped to the seven metro counties, then by the six watersheds.

To identify the entities owning land best suited to conservation efforts, the clipped SNACOA can be rasterized (using a 10 meter by 10 meter resolution), used as an input to Zonal Statistics in conjunction with the clipped parcel dataset, and queried with SQL to identify the top 10 parcels with the largest areas with the most land of conservation interest.

The output of this workflow reveals the largest landowners with the most land critical to conservation are farmers (or landlords of farmland).

In the Majority columns, taxpayers Sever Peterson Family Trust, P Farm Hdg #3 Lp And H Notermann Tr (possily "Peterson Farm Holding #3 LP and Howard Notermann Trust?"), seem to be agriculturally-related in some manner based on google searches and the land use of these parcels based on the 2023 FSA aerial imagery. Cargill Inc likely supports Cargill's river shipping operations (although there's no obvious current land use). Minnesota Valley Lands LLC is potentially owned by the Minnesota Valley Land Trust, Mid America Festivals Corp operates the local Rennaisance Fair, Valleyfair LLC comprises half an amusement park, SMS comprises a commercial composting initiative owned and operated by the SMSC

But farmers often need their land freely available to grow crops and don't often have a lot of extra cash laying around to particpiate in habitat restoration. This is the output when farmers are removed from consideration: