Protected area, easement, and rental contract data reveal five communities of land protection in the United States

Abstract

Land protection efforts represent large societal investments and are critical to biodiversity conservation. Land protection involves a complex mosaic of areas managed by multiple organizations, using a variety of mechanisms to achieve different levels of protection. We develop an approach to synthesize, describe, and map this land protection diversity over large spatial scales. We use cluster analysis to find distinct “communities” of land protection based on the organizations involved, the strictness of land protection, and the protection mechanisms used. We also associate identified land protection communities with socioenvironmental variables. Applying these methods to describe land protection communities in counties across the coterminous United States, we recognize five different land protection communities. Two land protection communities occur in areas with low human population size at higher elevations and include a large amount of protected land primarily under federal management. These two community types are differentiated from one another by the particular federal agencies involved, the relative contributions of smaller actors, and the amount of protection by designations vs. conservation easements or covenants. Three remaining land protection communities have less overall protection. Land in one community is primarily protected by federally managed rental contracts and government managed easements; another is managed by a diversity of non‐federal actors through fee‐ownership and easements; and the third stands out for having the lowest amount of formally recorded protection overall. High elevation and poor quality soils are over‐represented in U.S. protected lands. Rental contracts help fill in gaps in counties with high productivity soil while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fills in gaps in low‐elevation counties. Counties with large numbers of threatened species have more and stricter protection, particularly by regional entities like water management districts. The ability to synthesize and map land protection communities can help conservation planners tailor interventions to local contexts, position local agencies to approach collaborations more strategically, and suggest new hypotheses for researchers regarding interactions among different protection mechanisms.

Partnerships between organizations that manage protected land in California are associated with groups with environmentally oriented missions

“…Data on land managed through conservation rental contracts, which are by definition partnerships between land owner (usually private) and renter (usually government), are not available through PAD-US. The largest such program in the United States, the Conservation Reserve Program, protects more land in the lower 48 than either the National Park Service or the Fish and Wildlife Service (Jackson et al, 2021). In addition, our dataset provides no information on partnerships that are not directly involved in land management, such as those developed to advocate for, facilitate, and monitor land protection.…”

“…Specifically, many organizations are not explicitly conservation focused. Organizations that manage protected lands in the United States include a wide range of entities such as federal, state, and local governments, charitable organizations that work on conservation, wildlife, or community issues, and private organizations such as cemeteries and homeowner associations (e.g., Jackson et al, 2021; Wilkins et al, 2021).…”

Costs in conservation: Common costly mistakes and how to avoid them

“…In the case of private delivery of environmental goods, such as on private land, auctions are a common (but diverse in form) method to elicit costs [ 73 ]. Auctions, either pilots or ongoing programs, can reveal appropriate pricing of environmental services [ 74 – 76 ] and other social dimensions of participants [ 71 , 77 ]. It is worth noting that information on environmental benefits, as well as other signals of cost (e.g., land valuation, auction reserves, agricultural rents, and surrogate measures of benefits and/or costs), are still commonly used by those running the auction to evaluate the bids received alongside the elicited costs (for summaries of program inputs, see in particular [ 71 , 75 ]).…”

Institutional analysis of actors involved in the governance of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes

“… Barghusen et al, 2021 , Franks and Mc Gloin, 2007 , van Dijk et al, 2015 , Westerink et al, 2017 , Zaga-Mendez et al, 2021 ), land tenure (e.g. Benez-Secanho and Dwivedi, 2020 , Curran et al, 2016 , Eder et al, 2021 , Jackson et al, 2021 , Tseng et al, 2021 ), and value chain contracts (e.g. Cao et al, 2020 , Haggar, 2013 , Krause and Matzdorf, 2019 , Manyise and Dentoni, 2021 ).…”