As the demands on agricultural lands to produce food, fuel, and fiber continue to expand, effective strategies are urgently needed to balance biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. “Land sparing” and “wildlife‐friendly farming” have been proposed as seemingly opposing strategies to achieve this balance. In land sparing, homogeneous areas of farmland are managed to maximize yields, while separate reserves target biodiversity conservation. Wildlife‐friendly farming, in contrast, integrates conservation and production within more heterogeneous landscapes. Different scientific traditions underpin the two approaches. Land sparing is associated with an island model of modified landscapes, where islands of nature are seen as separate from human activities. This simple dichotomy makes land sparing easily compatible with optimization methods that attempt to allocate land uses in the most efficient way. In contrast, wildlife‐friendly farming emphasizes heterogeneity, resilience, and ecological interactions between farmed and unfarmed areas. Both social and biophysical factors influence which approach is feasible or appropriate in a given landscape. Drawing upon the strengths of each approach, we outline broad policy guidelines for conservation in agricultural landscapes.

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Ecosystem service approaches to conservation are being championed as a new strategy for conservation, under the hypothesis that they will broaden and deepen support for biodiversity protection. Where traditional approaches focus on setting aside land by purchasing property rights, ecosystem service approaches aim to engage a much wider range of places, people, policies, and financial resources in conservation. This is particularly important given projected intensification of human impacts, with rapid growth in population size and individual aspirations. Here we use field research on 34 ecosystem service (ES) projects and 26 traditional biodiversity (BD) projects from the Western Hemisphere to test whether ecosystem service approaches show signs of realizing their putative potential. We find that the ES projects attract on average more than four times as much funding through greater corporate sponsorship and use of a wider variety of finance tools than BD projects. ES projects are also more likely to encompass working landscapes and the people in them. We also show that, despite previous concern, ES projects not only expand opportunities for conservation, but they are no less likely than BD projects to include or create protected areas. Moreover, they do not draw down limited financial resources for conservation but rather engage a more diverse set of funders. We also found, however, that monitoring of conservation outcomes in both cases is so infrequent that it is impossible to assess the effectiveness of either ES or BD approaches.conservation ͉ conservation organizations ͉ protected area ͉ working landscapes E cosystem service approaches to conservation offer a promising way to align conservation and production, simultaneously enhancing human well being and protecting Earth's biodiversity and life-support systems (1-10). Developing marketbased mechanisms for ecosystem services by ascribing them value, both economic and social, may help diminish poverty and improve human welfare (11-15). These approaches offer hope for making conservation mainstream, by enlisting the support of a greater number and variety of funders and partners, by spanning the continuum of ''wild'' to human-dominated places, and by broadening the financial and institutional approaches used for conservation. At the same time, there is a risk that by straying from a pure focus on nature reserves and biodiversity, conservation projects that address ecosystem services may detract from biodiversity protection (16).Previous research and reviews have demonstrated the use of specific tools for including ecosystem services in conservation (e.g., 11, 17, 18). Here, we provide the first quantitative comparison of conservation projects focused in part on ecosystem services (ES) and those oriented more traditionally around biodiversity (BD) alone. Our aim is to test whether ecosystem service projects attract new and more diverse financial support and to explore other differences between these two project types. In particular, we ask whether ecosystem ser...

Few conservation projects consider climate impacts or have a process for developing adaptation strategies. To advance climate adaptation for biodiversity conservation, we tested a step-by-step approach to developing adaptation strategies with 20 projects from diverse geographies. Project teams assessed likely climate impacts using historical climate data, future climate predictions, expert input, and scientific literature. They then developed adaptation strategies that considered ecosystems and species of concern, project goals, climate impacts, and indicators of progress. Project teams identified 176 likely climate impacts and developed adaptation strategies to address 42 of these impacts. The most common impacts were to habitat quantity or quality, and to hydrologic regimes. Nearly half of expected impacts were temperature-mediated. Twelve projects indicated that the project focus, either focal ecosystems and species or project boundaries, need to change as a result of considering climate impacts. More than half of the adaptation strategies were resistance strategies aimed at preserving the status quo. The rest aimed to make ecosystems and species more resilient in the face of expected changes. All projects altered strategies in some way, either by adding new actions, or by adjusting existing 123Biodivers Conserv (2011) 20:185-201 DOI 10.1007 actions. Habitat restoration and enactment of policies and regulations were the most frequently prescribed, though every adaptation strategy required a unique combination of actions. While the effectiveness of these adaptation strategies remains to be evaluated, the application of consistent guidance has yielded important early lessons about how, when, and how often conservation projects may need to be modified to adapt to climate change.