It shares many attributes with conservation development, with the addition of strategies for maintaining and operating productive agriculture and silviculture, often in perpetuity.
A preservation development is a planned community that allows limited, carefully designed development (typically housing) on a working farm, while placing the majority of productive land under a system of easements and community governance to ensure a continuity of farming and environmental stewardship.
In 2005, this model was expanded into the Southeast, beginning with the 2,300 acre (931 ha) Bundoran Farm, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Parcels with ecological, historic or scenic value may be voluntarily placed under conservation easement, which prohibits or significantly limits future development of the land.
In this context, Preservation Development is an appropriate settlement pattern for the two or three lowest-density landscape types on the transect, and insufficiently dense for the other categories.