define ant property from environment with default value

An example from the Ant documentation of how to get an environment variable into a property:

<property environment="env"/>
<echo message="Number of Processors = ${env.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS}"/>
<echo message="ANT_HOME is set to = ${env.ANT_HOME}"/>

In your case, you would use ${env.RELEASE_VER}.

Then for the conditional part, the documentation here says that there are three possible attributes:

Attribute  Description                                             Required 
property   The name of the property to set.                        Yes 
value      The value to set the property to. Defaults to "true".   No 
else       The value to set the property to if the condition       No
           evaluates to false. By default the property will
           remain unset. Since Ant 1.6.3

Putting it together:

<property environment="env"/>
<condition property="fileTargetName" value="${env.RELEASE_VER}" else="dev">
    <isset property="env.RELEASE_VER" />
</condition>