Understanding variation in impacts from private protected areas across regions and protection mechanisms to inform organizational practices

Conserv Biol. 2024 Feb 8:e14225. doi: 10.1111/cobi.14225. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTPrivate land protection is an important and growing tool to address biodiversity loss and climate change. Thus, better empirical evidence on the effectiveness of private land protection and organizational practices, such as targeting of lands for protection and choice of protection mechanism (i.e., fee simple land acquisition and conservation easements), is needed. We addressed this gap by estimating the impacts of The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) (a large nongovernmental organization with relatively decentralized management) conservation land acquisitions and easements from 1988 to 2016 in three regions of the United States (Mid-Atlantic, New England and New York, and California). We estimated impact in terms of avoided conversion by comparing natural land cover on 3179 protected parcels with matched unprotected parcels. Nineteen of 21 ecoregional plans used threats of agriculture and development to identify priorities for protection. When regions and protection mechanisms were pooled, on average there was no evidence of avoided conversion from 1988 to 2016. Accounting for mechanisms, TNC land acquisitions avoided conversion and easements did not. TNC's easements on parcels acquired by conservation partners did avoid conversion. Limitations of these results include focus on a single measure of impact, inability to capture future avoided conversion, and low land cover change accuracy in Cali...

Source: Conservation Biology - February 8, 2024 Category: Biology Authors: Sarah Hagen Christoph Nolte Yuhe Chang Seth Morgan Giulio Boccaletti Sheila M W Reddy Source Type: research