Landscape-scale conservation initiatives have become more common in the past few decades. Many factors led to these increases including a broadening of conservation strategies, technology, and threats to many ecological systems; species' population declines; and a growing understanding of the need for cooperative conservation. Population and habitat threats and declines often occur on privately owned farms, ranches, and forests, sometimes referred to as 'working lands,' which presents a host of challenges and opportunities for conservation. A key challenge of emerging initiatives is funding for conservation. We explore 2 landscape-scale initiatives that have become loosely linked by the Working Lands for Wildlife partnership. Both have benefited from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) funding that resulted from an agreement between the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the U.S. Department of Interior Fish and Wildlife Service (USDA 2012). We describe a few national cooperative conservation developments to demonstrate their importance to our 2 case studies and the ecosystem of private lands wildlife conservation.
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