With the budding trees at the entrance of the park's hiking trails as a backdrop, Gov. George Pataki and state and local officials joined David Rockefeller and Dr. Lucy Rockefeller Waletzky yesterday in making the announcement. The land, worth $10 million, sits on the northeast edge of the preserve between Saw Mill River and Bedford roads.

"It creates a new northeast access and corridor to the park to residents of Pleasantville, students and faculty of Pace University and anyone using the North County Trailway," said Waletzky, daughter of billionaire philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller and niece of former state governor and U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Waletzky, along with her uncle David Rockefeller, donated the parcel through a family non-profit group.

Part of the donated land had been slated for development into 20 to 30 homes until last year. The Stone Barns Restoration Corp., a Rockefeller-controlled nonprofit group, had planned to sell the property to Manhattan developer Michael Daly.

In October, Waletzky donated $4.7 million to the nonprofit group, the same amount as Daly's option to buy the 94-acre parcel. That gift allowed the group to donate 10 acres to the county and the rest to the state to add to the preserve.

The new land will add streams, trails, and forested land to the preserve, increasing its total size to 1,233 acres. It will also help support the preserve's new Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, which opens next month.

"We are doing everything we can to make sure the conservation and environmental standards of this state get better and better," Pataki said.

Pataki said the donation brought the state a step closer to his goal of protecting 1 million acres of the state's open space by the end of the decade. At the moment, about 780,000 acres have been protected since Pataki took office, he said.

Yesterday was the last of a series of preservation agreements announced by the governor to commemorate Earth Week. An agreement announced Wednesday, protecting about 260,000 acres in the Adirondack Park, is the largest conservation pact in state history, the governor said.

In areas in Westchester, where land is in high demand by developers, it is especially important to protect open space, Pataki said.

"In places like Westchester County ... it is far more expensive because of property values to preserve pristine areas," he said.

Waletzky, recently named chairwoman of the Taconic State Park Commission, said a biodiversity study under way at the preserve found there are fewer species of plants and animals in the park than is usual for a nature preserve its size, due in part to deer overgrazing and damage to vegetation by the Euro-Asian worm. The new parcels, which create a contiguous expansion of the park, will help ease biodiversity restoration efforts.

"Fundamental to increasing the biodiversity is larger pieces of interconnected land," said Waletzky.

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