Abstract

Is conservation planning driving our conservation actions?
Track: Conservation
Authors: Jon Fisher

We investigated the match between private land protection conducted by the world's largest land trust (The Nature Conservancy) and the science driven identification of priority areas for conservation. For the entire history of TNC the proportion of TNC lands within the priority areas was 74%. Prior to 10 years ago it was 80%, 5-10 years ago it was 76%, and in the last five years it was 81%. Conservation easements were found to have lower alignment with priority areas (64%) than outright fee simple acquisitions (86%). Since there was comparable alignment in lands acquired before and after formalized conservation planning had been implemented as a standard operating procedure, this analysis did not find evidence that defining priority areas has influenced land acquisition decisions. Further investigation is needed given some potential confounding factors.