Conserving Species in a Working Landscape: Land Use With Biological and Economic Objectives

Abstract

Habitat loss and fragmentation are major threats to biodiversity. Establishing formal protected areas is one means of conserving habitat, but socio-economic and political constraints limit the amount of land in such status. Addressing conservation issues on lands outside of formal protected areas is also necessary. In this paper we develop a spatially explicit model for analyzing the consequences of alternative land-use patterns on the persistence of various species and on market-oriented economic returns. The biological model uses habitat preferences, habitat area requirements, and dispersal ability for each species to predict the probability of persistence of that species given a land-use pattern. The economic model uses characteristics of the land unit and location to predict the value of commodity production given a land-use pattern. We use the combined biological and economic model to search for efficient land-use patterns in which the conservation outcome cannot be improved without lowering the value of commodity production. We illustrate our methods with an example that includes three alternative land uses, managed forestry, agriculture, and biological reserve (protected area), for a modeled landscape whose physical, biological, and economic characteristics are based on conditions found in the Willamette Basin in Oregon (USA). We find that a large fraction of conservation objectives can be achieved at little cost to the economic bottom line with thoughtful land-use planning. The degree of conflict between conservation and economic returns appears much less using our joint biological and economic modeling approach than using a reserve-site selection approach, which assumes that species survive only inside of reserves and economic activity occurs only outside of reserves.

Land-use change reduces habitat suitability for supporting managed honey bee colonies in the Northern Great Plains

“…As global demand for resources and sustainable energy increases, there is a pressing need for a holistic examination of the impact of land-use change on a suite of ecosystem services, environmental tradeoffs, and biodiversity impacts (25,37,38). Here, we examined the impact of biofuel crop production on honey bee habitat; however, other impacts could also be evaluated to better understand how socioeconomic factors and global markets drive land-use change and affect multiple ecosystem service outputs.…”

Linking social norms to efficient conservation investment in payments for ecosystem services

“…Efficient conservation investments need to incorporate biological values with heterogeneous demographic, political, and socioeconomic conditions (11)(12)(13). The high human population and household density and growth rates in the biodiversity hotspots indicate that human population is and will remain an important factor in global biodiversity conservation (14,15), and the uneven distribution of human population and households should be considered in conservation investments (3).…”

The Economics of Restoration

“…Given such context, the identification of socially, environmentally, and economically acceptable options for forest landscape restoration through an explicit analysis of trade-offs and participatory processes are likely to be particularly important (Polasky et al, 2005). In the previous section methods were described to value the costs and benefits of restoration, in this section we discuss the most commonly used approaches to evaluate the priority of restoration projects, and how this information may be used in spatial and temporal planning of restoration activities.…”