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Since 1968, more than 2.5 percent of all the land area in Virginia has been put off limits from development using conservation easements.

That’s 687,117 acres under easement out of 27.3 million acres in the state, according to data from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. (And it doesn’t include other kinds of protected lands, like national parks, national forests, state parks, wildlife refuges and so on.)

I learned all this doing data work for a story by Rex Bowman about Gov. Tim Kaine nearing his goal of preserving 400,000 acres during his term, which began in January 2006 and ends in January 2010.

The tally toward Kaine’s goal was about 352,000 acres as of September. Only thing is, as Rex and I discovered in analyzing the data on over 4,000 easements on record with the DCR, Kaine is including almost 50,000 acres put under easements during the last six months of 2005 -- when Mark Warner was governor.

Kaine’s people say they include that period because it’s the first half of the fiscal year, which runs from July 2005 through June 2006. But by that reasoning, they should have stopped counting toward Kaine’s goal on June 30, 2009, and they haven’t. So, really, Kaine is giving himself a 4-and-a-half year window, when his term as governor is only four years.

Still, it’s a major achievement, and one of the most significant of Kaine’s tenure. The number of acres protected by easements has nearly doubled during Kaine’s time in the mansion. Easements added during Kaine’s term add up to something nearly twice the size of Roanoke County.

Even Kaine’s nemesis, House of Delegates Majority Leader Morgan Griffith (R-Salem) called that a good thing – through while knocking Kaine for mathematical chicanery.

Where are all these easements? How convenient you should ask. In the process of working on Rex’s story, I developed a couple of maps that didn’t make it into the paper. I thought I’d share them here.

Here’s a density map colored by how many acres are under easement in each city and county. The numbers in the legend are numbers of acres. Note that the lightest color is for localities that have no easements.

Less useful, but just so you can see it, is this map, showing where the easements are. There are more than 4,000 easements, and zoomed out this far, they all run together, but you can still get an idea of where they are just by the density of them. That clump up there in Northern Virginia is on the border of Fauquier and Loudon counties.

If you're thinking the answer is bus exhaust, that smell from the cafeteria on fish stick day, second-hand smoke or maybe pot, you've got some other things to consider, according to USA Today.

The national newspaper has released a special report called "The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America's Schools," which documents air quality around 128,000 public, private and parochial schools. You can search the newspaper's database to see how your school ranks. Enter the name of a specific school, search by your locality, or an entire state. Results are mapped.

And, if you're kids go to a school in Dublin, Va., or the Raleigh Court/Virginia Heights area of Roanoke, prepare to be disturbed. Read more »

A while ago an editor from USA Today who was teaching me about some software offered a truism about journalists with data: we always go straight for the biggest and baddest thing in a database.

So, you can guess what I did when Roanoke Times Metro Editor Brian Kelley told me about a the database at the Virginia Big Trees Program. I looked up Roanoke to find the biggest sucker in there.

The program, as the website itself puts it, "relies on volunteers to search for, nominate, and verify the measurements of big trees in Virginia. When a big tree is reported to the program, it is put into the Virginia Big Tree Database maintained jointly by the Virginia Forestry Association, the Virginia Department of Forestry, and the Virginia Tech College of Natural Resources."

The big winner turned out to be a 90-foot crack willow (Salix fragilis, for you Latin lovers out there) at 6311 Blacksburg Rd, "on right side of house in a field. Visible from road." That's in the picture.

You can search by locality, by the common or Latin name of a species, or other ways in the advanced search option.

This is terrific data partly because it's fascinating for what it documents, and partly for the way it documents it: by hand, by people out in the field with tape measures and cameras and pencils and paper. Many entries include hand-drawn maps to the locations.

In some ways, this is like the DataSphere's own black bear sightings map. It invites you to add to the database yourself by reporting what you've seen.

That's one of the best ways the Web works these days: the best content is created by the users themselves. Think YouTube for the most obvious example. YouTube for trees? For bears?

This is data doing what it can do best: becoming a conversation.

Ok, that's nerdy, but then this all started with my own glee over a database of big trees. I'm more of a data dork every day.

Lucky I'm married, because at this rate, I'd never get to kiss a girl again.

Just a pause to say thanks to those of you who have submitted black bear sightings for our map of bears in unusual places around the region.

I think I had five or six on there when I first posted the map in the DataSphere. There are now three times that.

Some cool ones came in, too. Jason Ball, who lives in Amherst County not too far from Buena Vista, sent in three sightings, including a regular visitor who fishes in the pond on his property. Bruce Cody told of one invader who left claw marks 9-feet up a tree from trying to reach a bird feeder.

Those are just a couple. Many more there of roadside sightings, mama's and babies in transit, and others. So, again, thanks, and keep 'em coming.

Recycling data for Virginia localities posted in the DataSphere is getting some interest in the print edition of The Roanoke Times.

Check out Duncan Adams' story on the rates, which has a particular focus on Floyd County's rate of 11 percent. That's well below the state mandated rate of 25 percent. That's from Sunday's paper.

Today's edition brought the opinion of our editorial staff on the rates.

"Virginia cities and counties could do much better. But as long as the state sticks to expectations set nearly 20 years ago, there is little reason for localities to try," it reads.

We've reposted our database of recycling rates for Virginia's 74 municipal waste handling agencies. We took it down last week after being alerted to errors in the data by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

The errors were ours. Turns out that the numbers were correct, but they weren't matched up with the correct agencies.

So have at it again.

When something doesn't seem right, well, sometimes that's because it's just not right.

A few days ago I made a post questioning the validity of numbers in a database we posted in the DataSphere. They showed an enormous increase in the amount of municipal waste produced in Roanoke from 2005 to 2006.

I was right to question the numbers -- they were indeed wrong -- but I should have looked to myself for the source of the error.

I'm still not sure how it occured, but it seems the data table for 2005 is garbled. The rates shown for Roanoke City are actually for Buckingham County.

We'll get it straightened out, but in the meantime, we've taken down that database. My apologies for the error and the confusion.

New in the Datasphere, recycling rates for the 74 Virginia municipal entities that handle your trash.

Our Roanoke area agencies all recycle something within a few percentage points one way or the other of a third of all their solid waste.

The source is the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality's annual recycling reports, which are compliled from reports made by the municipal agencies themselves.

But some of these numbers, quite frankly, seem hard to believe.

They range wildly, from a rate of 7.6 percent in Northampton County to a rate of 55 percent in the town of Vienna. Can a locality, even a small one in a progressive, wealthy part of the state that produces just 12,000 tons of trash a year really recycle more than half of its waste?

Part of the explanation lies in the agencies' ability to get credits added to their rate for recycling of private waste and for waste source reduction efforts.

Then there's things like these numbers. Roanoke had a dramatic increase in the rate from 23 percent in 2005 to 37 percent in 2006. That sounds great, but the numbers also show reported total solid waste of 15,000 tons in 2005 compared to 80,000 tons in 2006. What?

There are similar increases in Roanoke County. It all seems to suggest some change in calculations. I can find no accounting for it in the text of the 2006 DEQ report. We couldn't have a 400 percent increase in garbage from one year to the next, could we?

I hate to undermine the reliablity of data I've posted in the DataSphere. Maybe there are good explanations for all this. Still, if something smells funny about the state's report on garbage, you ought to know.

You've seen the video, the photographs: bear runs through downtown street, bear wanders into hospital, bear eats out of backyard birdfeeder.

It's can't miss stuff for newspapers and TV news. We're suckers for these things.

And here we go again. Now in the DataSphere, a map of sightings of black bears in interesting places around the Roanoke and New River valleys, with pictures and video in some instances.

There aren't a lot there yet, and that's where you come in, gentle reader. Email me with your sightings, friends. Send the date, time, location and a description of the bear and what it did, and don't forget the pics and vids if you got 'em. I'll stick 'em on the map and we'll all have more fun than a bear dosed up on ketamine.

As an aside, here's how this map "happened." A while back, the DataSphere was featured in a story on a prominent online journalism trade magazine site, called Poynter Online. Interviewing our editor, Carole Tarrant, the author asked what was next in the DataSphere. Carole replied, as a joke, that we'd be mapping sightings of black bears. The author took her seriously, and told the world that yours truly would be mapping black bear sightings.

Right away, we started seeing hits on the site from people doing Google searches for black bear sightings in Roanoke.

Well, we can't let the people down, now can we?