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Richard Bliss, founder of the Northern Virginia Conservation Trust, said he is proud of the progress his nonprofit has made in just 15 years.

What started as an effort to promote county park bond issues has grown into a successful campaign to save more than 5,300 acres of nearby nature in Northern Virginia, Bliss said.

Of the 5,300 acres protected, 482 are in Fairfax County. Still, Bliss said, there is much to do.

While the Northern Virginia Conservation Trust will celebrate its 15-year anniversary this week during an annual breakfast fundraiser in Annandale, the nonprofit's leadership is launching a new conservation strategy to be used in Fairfax County as well as other Northern Virginia localities.

"Ultimately, we'd like to see a greenbelt all the way around D.C.," said Bliss. "Saving land around metropolitan areas is important, because it's an air filter, a water filter and a physiological filter.

"This is forever. It's not just going to have a positive effect now, but decades from now."

NVCT president Michael Nardolili said the new conservation strategy is called Connecting Our Green Spaces.

"It is designed to look at areas like trails and parklands to see if we can combine them," he said. In particular, the conservation group is looking at an area of green space north of Washington Dulles International Airport, near Bull Run Regional Park. The area, if protected from development, will become part of the Washington, D.C.-area greenbelt, NVCT officials said.

Organizers of the campaign say their efforts have been received well by the community -- gaining residents', governments' and business owners' support.

NVCT, however, was not always greeted with such open arms.

"We started with high hopes but not a lot of money," said Bliss, who came up with the idea to start a land conservation group while serving as the representative for Dranesville on the Fairfax County Park Authority board.

"For the first five years, we spent most of our time trying to get park bonds passed," he said. "[The authority] didn't have any money and they didn't really have a plan [for land conservation] at the time."

Most of the nonprofit's success, Bliss said, happened during the last seven or eight years.

Before then, developers and elected officials questioned the group's intentions, he said.

"I had push-back from certain people in the Park Authority, who thought that we were going to take attention away from building new rec centers," Bliss said. "I got push-back from people who thought that we were environmental nuts or anti-development.

"But that's changed. There's a lot more recognition nationwide [for land conservation efforts]. We've saved thousands of acres."

While future land conservation projects are planned across the region, NVCT officials said Fairfax County will remain at the forefront of the organization's efforts.

"We were born and raised in Fairfax County and that's where we've focused," said Nardolili.

Successful projects to create land easements in Fairfax County include the donation of the Ruckstuhl property -- named for Dr. Lily Ruckstuhl -- which was donated to the trust after her death. The property was assessed at $1 million, said Nardolili, but was sold to the Park Authority for $250,000.

The property will likely be turned into a low-impact park, which could include community vegetable gardens and a tot-lot with swings, sandboxes and a playground, said Whit Field, NVCT's vice president and general counsel.

Additionally, the trust helped to protect land around the Salona homestead in McLean. The home was once owned by Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, a Revolutionary War hero and father of Civil War Gen. Robert E. Lee. NVCT added 41 acres to the 7.8-acre homestead grounds.

Field said a major conservation initiative in Fairfax County is stream valley preservation.

"It helps preserve wildlife corridors," he said.

"We worked on all the major streams that we can, for example Pimmit Run," Field said, citing two large tracts of land in the Mason Neck area -- where the Occoquan River meets the Potomac -- as other examples of the group's stream conservation efforts. "There is a lot of endangered plant life in the Potomac Gorge area."

The Northern Virginia Conservation Trust currently strives to protect land from development primarily in Fairfax County, Arlington and Alexandra, said Bliss, but is looking to branch out across the region.

"As every day goes by, there's less open land. It's become scarcer and scarcer," said Bliss. "When you donate money to a land trust, it's one of the only charities where you can go out and actually stand on your contribution."

To learn more, visit www.nvct.org.