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Recent high-profile efforts have called for integrating ecosystem-service values into important societal decisions, but there are few demonstrations of this approach in practice. We quantified ecosystem-service values to help the largest private landowner in Hawaii, Kamehameha Schools, design a land-use development plan that balances multiple private and public values on its North Shore land holdings (Island of O’ahu) of ∼10,600 ha. We used the InVEST software tool to evaluate the environmental and financial implications of seven planning scenarios encompassing contrasting land-use combinations including biofuel feedstocks, food crops, forestry, livestock, and residential development. All scenarios had positive financial return relative to the status quo of negative return. However, tradeoffs existed between carbon storage and water quality as well as between environmental improvement and financial return. Based on this analysis and community input, Kamehameha Schools is implementing a plan to support diversified agriculture and forestry. This plan generates a positive financial return ($10.9 million) and improved carbon storage (0.5% increase relative to status quo) with negative relative effects on water quality (15.4% increase in potential nitrogen export relative to status quo). The effects on water quality could be mitigated partially (reduced to a 4.9% increase in potential nitrogen export) by establishing vegetation buffers on agricultural fields. This plan contributes to policy goals for climate change mitigation, food security, and diversifying rural economic opportunities. More broadly, our approach illustrates how information can help guide local land-use decisions that involve tradeoffs between private and public interests.

In recent years, private land conservation has increased in profile among policymakers and academics. Conservation initiatives on privately owned land help to mitigate global biodiversity loss and introduce new actors to conservation. However, they have also been the subject of numerous critical accounts. This review catalogs issues that emerge in critical literature, identifying 25 themes, classified into three groups: Implementation Effectiveness, Value Conflict, and Economic Inefficiency. Gaps in the literature include the need for broader geographic coverage; assessment of the issues’ specificity to private land conservation; and evaluation of the extent to which issues in the literature reflect broader societal values. The literature’s strong emphasis on value conflict suggests that greater attention to governance effectiveness may steer private land conservation toward practices that are more just, equitable, and representative and lead to increased societal support. We recommend further research to address identified gaps, with a greater orientation toward inclusive governance.

Invasive species (IS) threaten biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. To achieve landscape-scale reductions in IS and the associated gains for biodiversity, IS control efforts must be expanded across private lands. Enhancing IS control across private lands requires an understanding of the factors that motivate residents to engage or prohibit residents from engaging in efforts to control IS. Drawing from the collective interest model and literature, we sought to understand how a wide range of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and contextual factors might influence resident action around combating the invasive tree albizia (Falcataria moluccana), in the Puna District of Hawai'i. To do so, we used a cross-sectional survey of 243 residents and elastic net regression techniques. We found that residents’ actions related to IS control were related to their perceptions of social norms and community reciprocity regarding albizia control, as well as their knowledge of effective control strategies and their risk perceptions regarding albizia. These findings suggest that, although common intervention approaches that focus on providing education or subsidies are important, they may be more effective at reducing the spread of IS if coupled with approaches that build community reciprocity and norms.

Information is critical for environmental governance. The rise of digital mapping has the potential to advance private-land conservation by assisting with conservation planning, monitoring, evaluation, and accountability. However, privacy concerns from private landowners and the capacity of conservation entities can influence efforts to track spatial data. We examine public access to geospatial data on conserved private lands and the reasons data are available or unavailable. We conduct a qualitative comparative case study based on analysis of maps, documents, and interviews. We compare four conservation programs involving different conservation tools: conservation easements (the growing but incomplete National Conservation Easement Database), regulatory mitigation (gaps in tracking U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species habitat mitigation), contract payments (lack of spatial data on U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program due to Farm Bill restrictions), and property-tax incentives (online mapping of Wisconsin’s managed forest tax program). These cases illuminate the capacity and privacy reasons for current incomplete or inaccessible spatial data and the politics of mapping private land. If geospatial data are to contribute fully to planning, evaluation, and accountability, we recommend improving information system capacity, enhancing learning networks, and reducing legal and administrative barriers to information access, while balancing the right to information and the right to privacy.

Voluntary private land conservation (PLC) is becoming an increasingly important complement to state protected areas around the world. PLC programs can serve as valuable strategies to increase biodiversity on agricultural lands, but their effectiveness depends on high participation rates. Amidst growing concerns regarding scalability and effectiveness of conservation strategies like national parks, researchers and practitioners are looking for new strategies to increase adoption of PLC. This study investigates the demographic, social, and psychological factors associated with participation in three classes of voluntary PLC programs—grant payments, land management agreements, and covenants—and how this relates to landholders’ attitudes toward tree clearing. We compare participation rates between these programs in Queensland and identify the most frequently cited reasons why land managers have or have not participated. Land managers who are more involved in agricultural organizations and whose tree clearing decisions are more influenced by the aesthetic value of trees are more likely to have participated in one or more of these programs. Participation was highly biased toward once-off grant payments, and participation in covenants was lowest of all programs. Although 58% of land managers have never participated, nearly half expressed interest in one or more programs. A lack of program knowledge and perceived losses of autonomy were the most frequently cited barriers to participation. We conclude with recommendations for increasing participation rates and raise important questions that need to be answered in order to promote a PLC culture that effectively curbs ongoing habitat degradation.

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.

Land protection, whether public or private, is often controversial at the local level because residents worry about lost economic activity. We used panel data and a quasi-experimental impact-evaluation approach to determine how key economic indicators were related to the percentage of land protected. Specifically, we estimated the impacts of public and private land protection based on local area employment and housing permits data from 5 periods spanning 1990–2015 for all major towns and cities in New England. To generate rigorous impact estimates, we modeled economic outcomes as a function of the percentage of land protected in the prior period, conditional on town fixed effects, metro-region trends, and controls for period and neighboring protection. Contrary to narratives that conservation depresses economic growth, land protection was associated with a modest increase in the number of people employed and in the labor force and did not affect new housing permits, population, or median income. Public and private protection led to different patterns of positive employment impacts at distances close to and far from cities, indicating the importance of investing in both types of land protection to increase local opportunities. The greatest magnitude of employment impacts was due to protection in more rural areas, where opportunities for both visitation and amenity-related economic growth may be greatest. Overall, we provide novel evidence that land protection can be compatible with local economic growth and illustrate a method that can be broadly applied to assess the net economic impacts of protection. La protección de terrenos públicos o privados a menudo es controversial a nivel local debido a la preocupación que tienen los residentes por la pérdida de actividades económicas. Usamos un panel de datos y una estrategia casi experimental de evaluación de impacto para determinar cómo los indicadores clave están relacionados con el porcentaje de terrenos protegidos. En específico, estimamos los impactos de la protección de terrenos privados y públicos con base en el empleo en el área local y los datos de permisos residenciales en cinco periodos que abarcaron de 1990 a 2015 para las principales ciudades y pueblos de Nueva Inglaterra. Para generar estimaciones rigurosas de impacto modelamos los resultados económicos como una función del porcentaje de suelo protegido durante el periodo previo, condicional a los efectos fijados de la ciudad o el pueblo, las tendencias de la metro-región, y los controles de protección vecina y por periodo. Contrario a las narrativas que dicen que la conservación deprime al crecimiento económico, la protección de tierras estuvo asociada con un crecimiento modesto del número de personas empleadas y en la fuerza laboral, y no afectó a los permisos residenciales nuevos, a la población o al promedio de ingresos. La protección pública y la privada resultaron en diferentes patrones de impactos positivos sobre el empleo a distancias cercanas y lejanas de las ciudades, lo que indica la importancia de la investigación en ambos tipos de protección de tierras para incrementar las oportunidades locales. La mayoría de los impactos sobre el empleo se debieron a la protección en áreas rurales, en donde las oportunidades para el crecimiento económico relacionado con visitas y amenidades puede ser mayor. En general, proporcionamos evidencias novedosas de que la protección de tierras puede ser compatible con el crecimiento económico local e ilustramos un método que puede aplicarse ampliamente para evaluar los impactos económicos netos de la protección.

Spatial prioritization techniques are applied in conservation-planning initiatives to allocate conservation resources. Although typically they are based on ecological data (e.g., species, habitats, ecological processes), increasingly they also include nonecological data, mostly on the vulnerability of valued features and economic costs of implementation. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of conservation actions implemented through conservation-planning initiatives is a function of the human and social dimensions of social-ecological systems, such as stakeholders' willingness and capacity to participate. We assessed human and social factors hypothesized to define opportunities for implementing effective conservation action by individual land managers (those responsible for making day-to-day decisions on land use) and mapped these to schedule implementation of a private land conservation program. We surveyed 48 land managers who owned 301 land parcels in the Makana Municipality of the Eastern Cape province in South Africa. Psychometric statistical and cluster analyses were applied to the interview data so as to map human and social factors of conservation opportunity across a landscape of regional conservation importance. Four groups of landowners were identified, in rank order, for a phased implementation process. Furthermore, using psychometric statistical techniques, we reduced the number of interview questions from 165 to 45, which is a preliminary step toward developing surrogates for human and social factors that can be developed rapidly and complemented with measures of conservation value, vulnerability, and economic cost to more-effectively schedule conservation actions. This work provides conservation and land management professionals direction on where and how implementation of local-scale conservation should be undertaken to ensure it is feasible.

Waterfowl conservation in North America provides an example of an abundant wildlife resource that was driven to alarmingly low levels as a result of unregulated exploitation of its populations and habitats, but which has since recovered because of cooperative efforts across multiple countries. Waterfowl conservation in North America began in earnest during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and has developed through international treaties and national policy as well as regional partnerships and supporting efforts of private landowners. In recent years, significant accomplishments have been realized through public–private partnerships that use local knowledge and engagement with stakeholders to develop conservation programs that are compatible with landowner interests and existing farming or ranching operations. Through the presentation of case studies from across North America, we demonstrate there exists no single ‘best’ program or framework for conserving waterfowl habitat on private lands, although a common denominator for success is robust support from an energized and resourceful partnership. Financial incentives provided a positive encouragement for participation, but private land programs will be most effective long term when they explicitly incorporate the needs of private landowners and generate benefits beyond provision of wildlife habitat. Successful conservation of waterfowl populations into the future will require a suite of programs and strategies and will hinge on our ability to develop conservation solutions that provide mutual benefits to waterfowl and an increasingly diverse private-landowner base.

As human activity accelerates the global crisis facing wildlife populations, private land conservation provides an example of wildlife management challenges in social-ecological systems. This study reports on the research phase of ‘WildTracker’ - a co-created citizen science project, involving 160 landholders across three Tasmanian regions. This was a transdisciplinary collaboration between an environmental organisation, university researchers, and local landholders. Focusing on mammal and bird species, the project integrated diverse data types and technologies: social surveys, quantitative ecology, motion sensor cameras, acoustic recorders, and advanced machine-learning analytics. An iterative analytical methodology encompassed Pearson and point-biserial correlation for interrelationships, Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS) for clustering, and Random Forest machine learning for variable importance and prediction. Taken together, these analyses revealed complex relationships between wildlife populations and a suite of ecological, socio-economic, and land management variables. Both site-scale habitat characteristics and landscape-scale vegetation patterns were useful predictors of mammal and bird activity, but these relationships were different for mammals and birds. Four focal mammal species showed variation in their response to ecological and land management drivers. Unexpectedly, threatened species, such as the eastern quoll ( Dasyurus viverrinus) , favoured locations where habitat was substantially modified by human activities. The research provides actionable insights for landowners, and highlights the importance of ‘messy,’ ecologically heterogeneous, mixed agricultural landscapes for wildlife conservation. The identification of thresholds in habitat fragmentation reinforced the importance of collaboration across private landscapes. Participatory research models such as WildTracker can complement efforts to address the wicked problem of wildlife conservation in the Anthropocene.