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The practice of conservation occurs within complex socioecological systems fraught with challenges that require transparent, defensible, and often socially engaged project planning and management. Planning and decision support frameworks are designed to help conservation practitioners increase planning rigor, project accountability, stakeholder participation, transparency in decisions, and learning. We describe and contrast five common frameworks within the context of six fundamental questions (why, who, what, where, when, how) at each of three planning stages of adaptive management (project scoping, operational planning, learning). We demonstrate that decision support frameworks provide varied and extensive tools for conservation planning and management. However, using any framework in isolation risks diminishing potential benefits since no one framework covers the full spectrum of potential conservation planning and decision challenges. We describe two case studies that have effectively deployed tools from across conservation frameworks to improve conservation actions and outcomes. Attention to the critical questions for conservation project planning should allow practitioners to operate within any framework and adapt tools to suit their specific management context. We call on conservation researchers and practitioners to regularly use decision support tools as standard practice for framing both practice and research.

Institutional fit is a prerequisite for governance of sustainable social-ecological systems. Scale mismatches, which occur when institutional fit is lacking, are common, sometimes leading to irreversible shifts in social-ecological regimes. In the American Great Plains, encroachment of eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) threatens to shift the system from grasslands to woodlands, a shift potentially exacerbated by scale mismatches in social-ecological systems governance. We diagnosed this mismatch by examining how ecological change at interacting spatial extents influences management responses and asked whether individual livestock producers attempted to improve institutional fit by elevating management responses from the individual to the collective level. We used Bayesian logistic regression with questionnaire and landcover data to predict whether producers use prescribed burning to manage encroachment. Prescribed burning was most likely when: regional-level encroachment was high and local-level encroachment was low, local-level encroachment was high and regional-level encroachment was low, or producers engaged in local groups. Individuals here navigate scale mismatch by engaging in collective action, leveraging existing individual behaviors while enabling higher-level institutional changes to better align woody encroachment management with its driving processes. Diagnosing scale mismatches and understanding how they are navigated may reveal leverage points for better aligning management with relevant environmental conditions.

The concept of adaptive capacity has received significant attention within social-ecological and environmental change research. Within both the resilience and vulnerability literatures specifically, adaptive capacity has emerged as a fundamental concept for assessing the ability of social-ecological systems to adapt to environmental change. Although methods and indicators used to evaluate adaptive capacity are broad, the focus of existing scholarship has predominately been at the individual- and household- levels. However, the capacities necessary for humans to adapt to global environmental change are often a function of individual and societal characteristics, as well as cumulative and emergent capacities across communities and jurisdictions. In this paper, we apply a systematic literature review and co-citation analysis to investigate empirical research on adaptive capacity that focus on societal levels beyond the household. Our review demonstrates that assessments of adaptive capacity at higher societal levels are increasing in frequency, yet vary widely in approach, framing, and results; analyses focus on adaptive capacity at many different levels (e.g. community, municipality, global region), geographic locations, and cover multiple types of disturbances and their impacts across sectors. We also found that there are considerable challenges with regard to the ‘fit’ between data collected and analytical methods used in adequately capturing the cross-scale and cross-level determinants of adaptive capacity. Current approaches to assessing adaptive capacity at societal levels beyond the household tend to simply aggregate individual- or household-level data, which we argue oversimplifies and ignores the inherent interactions within and across societal levels of decision-making that shape the capacity of humans to adapt to environmental change across multiple scales. In order for future adaptive capacity research to be more practice-oriented and effectively guide policy, there is a need to develop indicators and assessments that are matched with the levels of potential policy applications.

Ambient wildfire smoke in the American West has worsened considerably in recent decades, while the number of individuals recreating outdoors has simultaneously surged. Wildfire smoke poses a serious risk to human health, especially during long periods of exposure and during exercise. As such, evaluating whether people modify recreation in response to smoke is important to understanding the public health implications of these trends. Here we aggregate data on black carbon, a major component of wildfire smoke, and recreational visitation in 32 US national parks from 1980 to 2019 to examine how visitors respond to wildfire smoke. We hypothesize that visitor response may exhibit a threshold effect where ambient smoke reduces visitation after a critical level, but not before. We develop a series of breakpoint models to test this hypothesis. The results of these models are mixed, but overall show little to no effect of ambient smoke on visitation to the 32 parks tested, even when allowing for critical thresholds at the extreme upper ranges of smoke exposure. This indicates that wildfire smoke does not greatly alter park attendance. This finding suggests that management actions to protect visitor health during smoke events may be warranted.

Assessment of socio-environmental problems and the search for solutions often require intersecting geospatial data on environmental factors and human population densities. In the United States, Census data is the most common source for information on population. However, timely acquisition of such data at sufficient spatial resolution can be problematic, especially in cases where the analysis area spans urban-rural gradients. With this data release, we provide a 30-m resolution population estimate for the contiguous United States. The workflow dasymetrically distributes Census block level population estimates across all non-transportation impervious surfaces within each Census block. The methodology is updatable using the most recent Census data and remote sensing-based observations of impervious surface area. The dataset, known as the U.G.L.I (updatable gridded lightweight impervious) population dataset, compares favorably against other population data sources, and provides a useful balance between resolution and complexity. Measurement(s) Population Density Technology Type(s) satellite imaging Sample Characteristic - Organism Homo sapiens Sample Characteristic - Environment populated place Sample Characteristic - Location contiguous United States of America

Assessments of the potential responses of animal species to climate change often rely on correlations between long-term average temperature or precipitation and species’ occurrence or abundance. Such assessments do not account for the potential predictive capacity of either climate extremes and variability or the indirect effects of climate as mediated by plant phenology. By contrast, we projected responses of wildlife in desert grasslands of the southwestern United States to future climate means, extremes, and variability and changes in the timing and magnitude of primary productivity. We used historical climate data and remotely sensed phenology metrics to develop predictive models of climate-phenology relations and to project phenology given anticipated future climate. We used wildlife survey data to develop models of wildlife-climate and wildlife-phenology relations. Then, on the basis of the modeled relations between climate and phenology variables, and expectations of future climate change, we projected the occurrence or density of four species of management interest associated with these grasslands: Gambel’s Quail ( Callipepla gambelii ), Scaled Quail ( Callipepla squamat ), Gunnison’s prairie dog ( Cynomys gunnisoni ), and American pronghorn ( Antilocapra americana ). Our results illustrated that climate extremes and plant phenology may contribute more to projecting wildlife responses to climate change than climate means. Monthly climate extremes and phenology variables were influential predictors of population measures of all four species. For three species, models that included climate extremes as predictors outperformed models that did not include extremes. The most important predictors, and months in which the predictors were most relevant to wildlife occurrence or density, varied among species. Our results highlighted that spatial and temporal variability in climate, phenology, and population measures may limit the utility of climate averages-based bioclimatic niche models for informing wildlife management actions, and may suggest priorities for sustained data collection and continued analysis.

The United States has implemented a variety of policy mechanisms to protect agricultural lands, and individual states have invested $5.5 billion in this protection; however, the conversion of prime farmland to development continues. Is farmland protection policy effective in maintaining viable agricultural landscapes? In this study, we developed a suite of indicators to measure the performance of state-funded agricultural conservation easement programs including a) land quality, b) cost, c) development risk, d) proportion of a state’s agricultural land protected, and e) contiguity of protected land. We then compared these indicators across 11 states and among three different easement program designs using regression analysis and landscape metrics. We found that state-funded easement programs do not necessarily perform better than easements that were not acquired with public funds. Furthermore, we found that program design may be an important factor when measuring program performance. We categorized these programs by the degree of centralized decision-making and found that decentralized programs protect lands with at least three times higher quality, that are almost twice as valuable, and with at least 1.5 times greater development risk than centralized and collaborative programs. At the landscape level, easements in states with decentralized programs have at least 1.3 times greater contiguity compared to centralized and collaborative programs though they were also associated with the lowest proportion of the state’s agricultural land base under protection at 0.8%. Overall, our analysis revealed that irrespective of program design, there may be trade-offs between the quantity, quality, and cost of the lands protected. Further research is needed to fully investigate how farmland protection policies in general, and program design specifically, affect society’s ability to maintain a viable agricultural land base.

1. Conserving species' ability to traverse the landscape is vital for maintaining biodiversity in the face of global change. Connectivity conservation requires identifying important pathways for species' movements and aligning societal support for conservation of those pathways. Contemporary connectivity analyses emphasize the impacts of topography, vegetation and human footprint on species' movements; but largely ignore the role that attitudes, economics and institutions play in practitioners' ability to conserve those movements. 2. We introduce implementation resistance as an analogue of biophysical resistance that combines social, economic and institutional factors that promote or impede connectivity conservation. We demonstrate the utility of integrating implementation resistance as a means of choosing between competing connectivity conservation strategies using wolves in Colorado (USA) as a case study. 3. Our analysis of five potential corridor locations based on biophysical costs revealed substantial differences in the social costs associated with implementing each corridor despite relatively minimal differences in the biophysical costs. 4. Our comparison of hypothetical interventions to reduce implementation resistance illustrates that interventions that reduce conflicts between land use and wolves may substantially reduce overall resistance, those reductions are not as well aligned with connectivity priorities as those resulting from changes in land management agency policy. 5. Our results highlight the need to design conservation interventions that fit both the social and ecological landscape and provide a framework for developing robust, interdisciplinary methods that facilitate implementable connectivity conservation. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Many of the world's iconic, endangered and endemic species rely on large, contiguous landscapes for their survival. In the US West, working ranches are integral to large landscape conservation goals and there are numerous influences on ranchers' conservation actions, including their relational values, perceived self‐efficacy and property rights concerns. Using survey data from 681 ranchers in eastern Idaho and western Montana, we sought to answer the question: How do relational values, property rights orientations, perceived efficacy and public lands dependence affect reported conservation actions on private ranch lands? Conservation adoption varied widely by action, with invasive plant removal having the highest (92%) and conifer removal the lowest (21%) rates of adoption. Conservation adoption was higher among ranchers who believe they are responsible for conserving nature, believe their land should be used to provide environmental benefits to the region, have higher perceived self‐efficacy, lower property rights concerns and higher incomes. Programmes encouraging the adoption of conservation on private lands could benefit from message framing that resonates with the worldviews of landowners and land managers. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.