Private lands conservation: A vision for the future

Abstract

Agricultural production, including croplands, pasture, and timber, dominates private-land use and land cover across much of the contiguous lower 48 states. These private lands are essential to achieving the goals of national conservation initiatives such as the Northern Bobwhite Conservation Initiative (bobwhite [Colinus virginianus]), Sage Grouse Initiative, and North American Waterfowl Management Plan. Effective conservation delivery in managed landscapes requires 1) an understanding of landowner priorities and ownership objectives, 2) knowledge of the economic and environmental costs and benefits of conservation, and 3) natural resource professionals who understand the business of agriculture and forestry as well as principles of habitat management and wildlife conservation. We make the case for a new vision of multifunctional working landscapes that include designed components of natural and seminatural noncrop perennial plant communities (wetlands, grasslands, riparian areas, field margins, pine [Pinus spp.] grasslands, savannas, etc.) embedded in a matrix of row-crop, pasture, rangeland, and forested working lands that produce sustainable food, fiber, and fuel. Producing sustainable, multifunctional landscapes will require effective conservation delivery that is intentional, objective-driven, targeted, science-based, and landscape scale. We contend that it will also require a new kind of natural resource professional. We consider the specific and novel skill sets that will be required among natural resource professionals to deliver conservation to private owners-producers of working lands.

A state assessment of private lands wildlife conservation in the United States

“…Visionary leaders must inspire a national environmental awareness coupled with sustainable market‐driven solutions for private lands (Echols et al , Keyser et al , McConnell ). Our work must be more strategic and adaptive (Burger et al , Riley et al ) and must better accountant for society's values and desires (Golden et al , Gamborg et al ). As we embark into the next frontier of wildlife conservation challenges in the United States, effective conservation of private lands will be the keystone, and collaborations of people the mortar.…”

Lessons learnt from multiple private land conservation programs in Canada to inform species at risk conservation

“…The importance of conservation management on private lands has been recognized internationally (Sorice et al 2013; Kamal, Grodzińska‐Jurczak, et al 2015; Kamal, Kocór, et al 2015; Bingham et al 2017; Bennett et al 2018; Drescher and Brenner 2018; Prado et al 2018; Burger et al 2019; Cortés Capano et al 2019). With the destruction, alteration, and fragmentation of natural ecosystems identified as contributing factors to the loss of biological diversity (Parrott et al 2019; Hilty et al 2020), conservation on private lands can help maintain natural habitat and connectivity in fragmented landscapes.…”

Flipping the adult natural resources classroom to build community and learn in nature

“…Extension educators have a critical role to play in engaging the public in meaningful dialog on largescale socio-ecological challenges related to land stewardship like forest health, water quality, biodiversity conservation, and climate change (Goerlich et al, 2019;Krasny & Tidball, 2010). In the midwestern U.S. where land stewardship challenges are met with a highly diffuse land ownership and decision-making context (Burger et al, 2019), extension is poised to play an especially important and central role in messaging public-good information to private actors and compelling participation in interventions aimed at improving water quality, biodiversity conservation, or climate change (Bates & Arbuckle Jr, 2017;Grudens-Schuck et al, 2017;Prokopy et al, 2015). For example, in Iowa around 97% of the land area is held in private ownership and 81% of all land is in some sort of agricultural production (USDA NRI 2020).…”