Who Looks After Open Green Land, From City Councils to a Private Forest

Colonel William Light laid out the Adelaide Park Lands as part of his original plan for the city, a figure eight of open space that separates the centre from the suburbs on both banks of the River Torrens. The part outside the government reserves has been managed by the Adelaide City Council since 1852, which makes this the council-held example to start from.

The City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department manages this greenbelt, which runs about 7.25 miles from Zilker Park west to the Lost Creek neighborhood. It is split into the Barton Creek Wilderness Park, the Upper Greenbelt and the Lower Greenbelt, and its recorded founding year is 1974.

New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation maintains this system of contiguous parkland together with a nonprofit, the Greenbelt Conservancy. It is the second largest component of the city's park system and gathers several component parks, among them High Rock Park, LaTourette Park, the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge and Willowbrook Park. Its recorded inception is 1984.

This Spanish city built its green belt as a restoration and reclamation plan on its outskirts, begun in the early 1990s, linking urban parks of high ecological value by eco-recreational corridors. Five parks are established: Armentia, Olarizu, Salburua, Zabalgana and Zadorra. The United Nations selected the project among the 100 best performances at a competition held in Dubai in 2000.

Here the keeper is a state agency: the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service governs the parklands, which are listed under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974. They stretch from the City of Blacktown in the north through the City of Fairfield to the City of Liverpool, cover about 52.8 square kilometres, and the state government spent around 400 million Australian dollars on their development.

This 271 acre preserve in Louisville, Kentucky began as a gift. In 1979 Judge Macauley Smith and Emilie Smith donated the land to the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves, making it the first nature preserve in the state system. Since 1981 Jefferson County Public Schools has used it for an outdoor environmental education program that draws about 10,000 students a year.

A national forestry body holds this Nottinghamshire park. Forestry England acquired the land, then called Clipstone Heath, in 1925 and planted it with trees in response to a wood shortage after the First World War. It is the largest park in the East Midlands and now offers walking, bushcraft and mountain biking with a visitor centre.

Governance here is shared. The corridor grew from the roughly 870 mile network of fences and guard towers along the former inner German border, and it began in 1989 as a project of the environmental group Bund fur Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland. Federal and state governments now join conservation organisations to protect a network of habitats about 1,393 kilometres long and 177 square kilometres in area.

The last stop is privately owned. The Haliburton Forest Group owns this forest of about 10,000 acres near Huntsville, Ontario, which holds 20 lakes and offers hiking, biking, skiing and snowshoeing trails to visitors free of charge. It has been open to the public since 2003, and its management treats timber harvesting as secondary to recreation.