The Nature Conservancy in Michigan remains dedicated to protecting the lands and waters of the state through a variety of protection mechanisms. The Land and Water Protection Associate will directly support The Conservancy’s conservaiton efforts by developing, maintaining, and managing the essential ecological, social and legal information that is necessary to execute our conservation mission.

Specifically, the Land and Water Protection Associate manages and maintains conservation, legal record, and compliance databases related to the Michigan Business Unit conservation interests and provides technical support in GIS or other relational database technologies to Conservancy staff. This position provides support, technical writing for grant and project approvals, and completes due diligence for protection and real estate activities.

The Land and Water Protection Associate participates in conservation planning at various levels, develops methods for mapping and classifying ecosystems and data management; includes developing and maintaining all documentation for data and data management. They perform data analysis; design and produce advanced complex queries, professional reports, and process spatial and other relational data sets derived from cartographic and tabular source material. The Land and Water Protection Associate develops and delivers training to staff individually and in groups, produces maps and other graphic products and reports.

This position also develops and maintains GIS geodatabase, land protection, biodiversity, and management information from various sources. They complete and maintain all real estate records and legal document record copies for the Conservancy’s Michigan program ensuring compliance with Conservancy and LTA standards, including:

• Completing and routing project packages, enter basic project information into and maintain database records, organizing and managing active and completed project files, check quarterly reviews and statistics against database, track all restrictions and donor intentions for transfers, update protection statistics annually, review files for donor intent, funding, and other transaction specifics.
• Provide and respond to information requests from databases and analyze as requested (historic data, information, file research).
• Provide support and assistance to Director of Protection for real estate acquisitions, transfers, assists, easements, or management agreements. This may include drafting intent, acquisition, or offer letters for Director of Protection, monitoring conservation easements, completing due diligence and environmental hazard assessments, completing grants, agreements or contracts related to protection work, communicating with the appraiser, providing memos, creating maps and GIS related shapefiles, reviewing title work for issues, preparing baseline reports, and working with the legal team as needed.

The compensation range for this position starts at $53,000 and is dependent upon experience.