Monthly Archives: December 2010

Fermata End-of-the-Year News

Let us begin with wishing all of you a happy holiday season. We doubt that any of us will forget 2010, as hard as we may try! Here hoping for a productive, peaceful, prosperous 2011.

We have recently posted a new podcast and two PowerPoints to our Podcast and Presentation page. The podcast is a recording of Ted’s October talk to a group gathered in Beckley, West Virginia. The conference, titled Reaching the Summit: Balancing Commerce and Nature in the New River Gorge Region, is one of the Conservation Fund’s Balancing Nature and Commerce workshops where Ted periodically speaks. We have posted Ted’s PowerPoint from that conference as well.

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Fermata Wordle

We are often asked about the nature of our work (what do you do, exactly?). The answer is always cumbersome and incomplete. Now there is a web-based program that help us show what we do – Wordle. Wordle creates word clouds from text or a RSS feed from a website. This evening we ran the Fermata weblog through Wordle, and presto! here is a taste of what we do!

Fermata Word Cloud from Wordle

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The Economic Value of Protected Open Space

There is a new report analyzing the value of protected open space in SE PA that should interest you. The study, commissioned by the GreenSpace Alliance and Delaware Valley Regional Planning, reports the following:

Approximately 300 square miles, or 14%, of the five-county region is protected open space. The study found that this area:

  • Adds $16 billion to the value of southeastern Pennsylvania’s housing stock – an average property value increase of $10,000 per household;
  • Saves local governments and taxpayers more than $132 million a year in costs associated with provision of environmental services such as drinking water filtration and flood control;
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