In what may portend a troubling new trend, two prominent Island conservation properties — one in Edgartown and another in Chilmark — along with a third private property in Oak Bluffs have been virtually strip-mined to provide native plants for a billionaire landowner who is building a huge home on the North Shore.

A state environmental official who yesterday inspected all the properties involved confirmed several breaches of the Endangered Species Act.

But Tim Simmons, a restoration ecologist with Natural Heritage and Endangered Species program of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, was unsure if anyone would be formally cited, given the unprecedented circumstances of the case.

“We’ve never had a case like this before,” Mr. Simmons said. “We usually deal with outright habitat loss due to development. This is a different animal altogether.”

What makes the case unique is that instead of being destroyed outright, plants were lifted and moved, apparently at considerable expense and with significant damage to their original three sites — two of them belonging to the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation — and replanted on the 30-acre property of Dirk Ziff near Lambert’s Cove in West Tisbury.

The two foundation properties, the Caroline Tuthill preserve in Edgartown and the Priscilla Hancock Meadow in Chilmark, as well as Mr. Ziff’s land, are listed as priority habitat, a state designation applied to places which harbor rare or endangered animal and plant species.

Any alteration of priority habitat areas is subject to review by the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program (NHESP). But neither the contractors working for Mr. Ziff nor the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation informed the NHESP of the work.

Mr. Simmons said the damage to the Caroline Tuthill preserve, from which Mr. Ziff’s landscaping contractor John Hoff removed a number of large pitch pines and some cedars, was severe.

“The contractor went beyond just removing some of the pitch pines,” he said. “There’s a lot of scarified land there.

“At Priscilla Hancock Meadow, it was not quite as bad, but they were in some very high quality coastal heathland habitat there that they beat up a bit. I think it will recover.”

It is yet to be determined if the other site mined for Mr. Ziff’s landscaping — a little bluestem meadow on Iron Hill Farm Oak Bluffs, from which about a half-acre of turf was lifted — is priority habitat.

Mr. Simmons said in the case of the Iron Hill land, he could not tell what species had disappeared because the bluestem meadow had been lifted in its entirety. He said it would probably require follow-up visits to the meadow’s new location — assuming the plants survive the transplant — to work out what species would need to be restored to the original site.

That work was done by another contractor, Adrian Higgins, of Vineyard Engineering, with whom Mr. Simmons has not yet spoken.

“Then we went to the Ziff property too, where the stuff was being delivered and the amount of disturbance that had occurred up there on a 30-acre tract, and told them they were required to notify us of their project up there,” he said.

Mr. Simmons said all the parties he had spoken to are willing to play a part in the extensive remediation work which would be required to undo the damage.

That may take years, but one immediate effect of the case has been to end an informal arrangement which has long existed between Sheriff’s Meadow and some Island landscapers, which allowed them to remove trees from foundation properties in exchange for helping with their management.

The former executive director of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, Richard Johnson, admitted this week that tree and other vegetation removal, which was initially permitted by the foundation, had gotten out of control.

Mr. Johnson, who stepped down from the executive director position at the start of this month, and is now the foundation’s restoration ecologist, conceded this week he had made “a number of bad judgments” related to the use of plants from Sheriff’s Meadow properties, but said he believed he and all other parties in the arrangement had acted from good motives.

In the case of the Tuthill land, the foundation was trying to encourage the re-establishment of native grassland. To that end, it had long engaged in a barter deal with landscapers, under which they could take trees and other plants which had invaded the grassland in exchange for labor to control invasive species.

A similar deal applied on other properties, including Priscilla Hancock.

“Tuthill is 154 acres,” he said, “but less than 10 is grassland, and we want to expand that.”

He had previously worked with Mr. Hoff on the barter system, but on this occasion, Mr. Hoff had offered him money, which he refused, saying he would rather have some work done in the future.

“We’ve always operated just on a handshake agreement, this kind of old, neighborly way of doing business, based on trust,” Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Johnson conceded he had made a “major mistake” by not asking how much Mr. Hoff intended to take.

“And this one was on a whole different scale. I didn’t realize, starting out, just how big it would be or how much of an impact it was going to have on the land, how it was going to look.

“He took a couple of dozen of the native pitch pines, and three or four cedars. The pitch pines were bigger than any trees I’ve seen anybody move before,” Mr. Johnson said.

The trees were so big, in fact, that they could not be removed in the normal way, with a tree spade, which takes a reasonably neat root ball, he said, but required other earth moving equipment which made more of a mess.

Mr. Johnson said he also was embarrassed at not having lodged appropriate notification with the NHESP.

“We’re supposed to go through and get an approved management plan lodged with the program, which I knew. There’s no excuse. We were wrong to have done that without having got the approval,” he said.

He said he did not blame Mr. Hoff for the mess.

“I have no animosity to John. It’s my fault. I take responsibility. It’s not his job to figure out what should happen on Sheriff’s Meadow property. It’s up to me to say no.

“People say, ‘Oh he’s taking advantage of you, he’s making all this money.’ You know, I’m an adult, I can figure this out. I don’t have a problem with him making money off it.”

Mr. Johnson maintained the damage looks worse than it is, and in time the work might yet be seen as a positive thing, because it removed so much unwanted vegetation.

Mr. Hoff put much of the blame for the damage done to the Tuthill preserve on another, off-Island contractor who provided the machinery for the work. He would not name the contractor, nor would he name his client, Mr. Ziff.

“My client would like to remain anonymous if possible,” Mr. Hoff said.

“They do a lot of good for the hospital and other foundations on the Island. They are a big donator to a lot of the charities. He’s a very liberal person and a big donator in our community.”

Mr. Hoff, who owns Oak Leaf landscaping and recently bought and reopened Middletown Nursery in West Tisbury, said those involved in the arrangement were trying to do a fundamentally good thing.

“It looks a little messy as the process goes, but what we’re trying to do is restore that native meadowland,” he said, adding:

“We’re going to work with Dick on replanting it with native stock or seeding it with native stock come fall, but that program . . . we’ll work it out with him. It will be a year to two-year program.”

“Just yesterday [Tuesday], we went in, graded it out, did a final raking.”

He also suggested his wealthy client would donate to Sheriff’s Meadow.

“I’m hoping by stepping up and putting myself out there, you might take a benign look at what we’re doing with this client,” he said.

“I know a lot of people have bad reactions to what some of these clients are asking to do, but they are saving plants, they are pushing the native plant idea and we are working in partnership with the organizations here,” Mr. Hoff said.

But the native plant relocation work is on a scale never seen before on the Island.

It is understood that Mr. Hoff has approached other landowners, including two Island farmers, and offered them large sums of money to remove native plants from their land. The offers were refused.

Mr. Hoff, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Simmons all suggested that beyond the current case, there were hopeful signs that people had absorbed the message that it was important to use Island-native plants to augment the habitat protected by conservation organizations.

The problem, they said, was the demand had now outstripped supply.

And there will be a net benefit to the priority habitat at the end of it all, Mr. Simmons said; whatever other action the state authorities decided to take, they will insist that the parties would have to rehabilitate at twice as much land as they damaged.

“Generally if you disturb or destroy priority habitat on a site, we require twice as much to be preserved somewhere else.

“A two-to-one ratio is the minimum we require, for a net benefit. We’ll get all those figures together and work out what needs to be done and what the standards will be.”

But the bottom line, Mr. Simmons sadly noted, is that none of this would have happened if one landowner had been more patient.

“It’s unfortunate, because simple routine management would have resulted in very similar conditions in a few years [on the Ziff property],” he said, concluding:

“I don’t think it was necessary, to achieve the results they wanted, but they may have felt it was necessary to achieve those results in the time period they want.

“My way would have taken four or five years, and this was sort of instant gratification.”