Private organizations, public data: Land trust choices about mapping conservation easements

Rissman, Adena R.; Morris, Amy Wilson; Kalinin, A.I.; Kohl, Patrice A.; Parker, Dominic P.; Selles, Owen

doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104221

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Conservation easements are important to include in this dataset because such lands support biodiversity and can cover large swaths of land, especially in Florida. We recognize that not all land trusts choose to share their conservation easements with the NCED due to lack of funding and technical capacity, or privacy concerns, and that it may vary from state to state (Rissman et al, 2019). This may present an unknown bias in Georgia, Alabama, and other states, however in Florida the area of easements acquired by land trusts are very minor in comparison to those held by state and federal agencies.…”

Section: Supporting: Landscape Structure Biodiversity and Habitatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem Services in Working Lands of the Southeastern USA

Coffin

Sclater

Swain

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Agriculture and natural systems interweave in the southeastern US, including Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, where topographic, edaphic, hydrologic, and climatic gradients form nuanced landscapes. These are largely working lands under private control, comprising mosaics of timberlands, grazinglands, and croplands. According to the “ecosystem services” framework, these landscapes are multifunctional. Generally, working lands are highly valued for their provisioning services, and to some degree cultural services, while regulating and supporting services are harder to quantify and less appreciated. Trade-offs and synergies exist among these services. Regional ecological assessments tend to broadly paint working lands as low value for regulating and supporting services. But this generalization fails to consider the complexity and tight spatial coupling of land uses and land covers evident in such regions. The challenge of evaluating multifunctionality and ecosystem services is that they are not spatially concordant. While there are significant acreages of natural systems embedded in southeastern working lands, their spatial characteristics influence the balance of tradeoffs between ecosystem services at differing scales. To better understand this, we examined the configuration of working lands in the southeastern US by comparing indicators of ecosystem services at multiple scales. Indicators included measurements of net primary production (provisioning), agricultural Nitrogen runoff (regulating), habitat measured at three levels of land use intensity, and biodiversity (supporting). We utilized a hydrographic and ecoregional framework to partition the study region. We compared indicators aggregated at differing scales, ranging from broad ecoregions to local landscapes focused on the USDA Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Network sites in Florida and Georgia. Subregions of the southeastern US differ markedly in contributions to overall ecosystem services. Provisioning services, characterized by production indicators, were very high in northern subregions of Georgia, while supporting services, characterized by habitat and biodiversity indicators, were notably higher in smaller subregions of Florida. For supporting services, the combined contributions of low intensity working lands with embedded natural systems made a critical difference in their regional evaluation. This analysis demonstrated how the inclusion of working lands combined with examining these at different scales shifted our understanding of ecosystem services trade-offs and synergies in the southeastern United States.

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Section: Supporting: Landscape Structure Biodiversity and Habitatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem Services in Working Lands of the Southeastern USA

Coffin

Sclater

Swain

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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“…the terms of the easement agreement laying out what is protected in perpetuity). Despite Olmsted's (2011) optimism that we were nearing the end of "clandestine conservation" at the beginning of last decade, privacy concerns of property owners still limit data access (Rissman et al, 2017(Rissman et al, , 2019, including this project's nondisclosure agreement with SC-TNC. It is clear that wealthy private landowners benefit disproportionately from public subsidies in the form of decreased tax burden.…”

Section: Measures Of Environmental Justice: Opportunities and Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conserving what? Conservation easements and environmental justice in the coastal US South

2020

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Conservation easements, voluntary legal agreements whereby a landowner forfeits some of his or her land development rights in exchange for tax benefits, are an increasingly common strategy for protecting land from development in the United States today. For instance, from 2005 to 2015, private land under conservation easement in the United States increased by 175%, growing to more than 16 million acres held by land trusts, which are collectively endowed with more than $2.2 billion in funding. Recent critical analyses of this trend conceptualize conservation easements as a tool of neoliberal environmental governance, whereby nature is increasingly individuated and conservation is (at least partially) privatized. Conservation easements grew rapidly in the 1980s as the result of a compromise between mainstream environmental organizations and the Reagan administration’s anti-public lands agenda; thus, one interpretation is that they are the pragmatic “roll-out” of conservation efforts from a handcuffed liberal environmental movement. Yet, our historical and qualitative analysis of the politics of conservation easements in the coastal US South suggests that they were actually an elite white class project from the start, rather than a reaction to constraints on public lands protection. Thus, we argue that the environmental justice implications of conservation easements deserve more attention. Our efforts to develop a spatial-statistical assessment of the ways that their ecological benefits are distributed beyond parcel boundaries were limited by the privatization of data on conservation easements. Instead, we assess the distribution of easements themselves across the region, finding limited differences, but ones that we interpret as meaningful, between public and private conservation lands regarding racial composition and incomes of nearby populations. Importantly, this kind of mixed-methods analysis indicates how the exclusive control of data undergirds the exclusive control of land. Most broadly, we argue that Cheryl Harris’s theorization of “whiteness as property” remains an important resource for political ecologists because it helps specify the relationship between race, class, and nature under capitalism.

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“…However, size, fragmentation, location, and land-use can be barriers to the success and efficacy of protected area conservation [4]. Private protected areas (parcels "owned or secured by non-profits, individuals, communities, or corporations") [5] can be a useful method for sustaining socio-ecological systems and conserving biodiversity [4]. While this approach to conservation also comes with its challenges, it has been found that the participation of landowners and stakeholders can aid in the success and sustainability of these types of conservation initiatives in a particular area [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They use a variety of mechanisms to accomplish this goal including land or monetary donations, conservation easements, and direct purchase [8][9][10]. Conservation easements (also referred to as easements) are legal documents permitted by U.S. national legislation that accompany the land title and transfer with land sales (e.g., [11]), they are used to form binding agreements between landowners and land trust organizations in order to mitigate development, preserve land, and restrict land use [5]. The expansion of land trust organizations in the U.S. can be attributed to the effective publicity of many existing land trusts because of their acquisition of ecologically and historically important lands [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Local communities are drivers of social constructs, and through understanding community dynamics, interests, and motivations, effective conservation tools can be created and enforced [39,40]. There exists a decent amount of literature on the protection of private lands through land trust initiatives (e.g., [5,[41][42][43][44][45]); however, there remains a need to recognize the specific characteristics and motivations of stakeholders that lead to participation in such initiatives [46,47]. Understanding motivations for involvement by current stakeholders can provide insight for identifying similar groups may have interest in conservation [47], thus potentially expanding the use of this conservation approach and its expected benefits.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Perceptions of, and Motivations for, Land Trust Conservation in Northern Michigan: An Analysis of Key Informant Interviews

Braddock

Heinen

2021

Sustainability

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Land trusts are common and expanding mechanisms for conservation, although their impacts have been little-studied. The objective of this paper is to understand the perceptions and motivations of stakeholders of small-scale land trust conservation. We used 33 key informant interviews to learn the motivations and opinions of stakeholders regarding the Little Traverse Conservancy (LTC) of northern Michigan, USA. The interviews were coded for relevant themes and interpreted alongside a literature review. The highest reported motivation for stakeholder involvement with LTC was the protection of nature and scenic beauty. Economic and social factors were also considered motivators; however, were not the key facilitators for conservation action for LTC stakeholders. Interviews emphasized that relationship and partnership formations are critical for facilitating successful land conservation. We conclude that land trust organizations can captivate the long-term support and participation of stakeholders through the consideration of local dynamics and building upon existing community relationships.

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Private organizations, public data: Land trust choices about mapping conservation easements

Cited by 11 publications

References 38 publications

Ecosystem Services in Working Lands of the Southeastern USA

Ecosystem Services in Working Lands of the Southeastern USA

Conserving what? Conservation easements and environmental justice in the coastal US South

Perceptions of, and Motivations for, Land Trust Conservation in Northern Michigan: An Analysis of Key Informant Interviews

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