Conservation organizations rely on conservation easements for diverse purposes, including protection of species and natural communities, working forests, and open space. This research investigated how perpetual conservation easements incorporated property rights, responsibilities, and options for change over time in land management. We compared 34 conservation easements held by one federal, three state, and four nonprofit organizations in Wisconsin. They incorporated six mechanisms for ongoing land management decision-making: management plans (74 %), modifications to permitted landowner uses with discretionary consent (65 %), amendment clauses (53 %), easement holder rights to conduct land management (50 %), reference to laws or policies as compliance terms (47 %), and conditional use permits (12 %). Easements with purposes to protect species and natural communities had more ecological monitoring rights, organizational control over land management, and mechanisms for change than easements with general open space purposes. Forestry purposes were associated with mechanisms for change but not necessarily with ecological monitoring rights or organizational control over land management. The Natural Resources Conservation Service-Wetland Reserve Program had a particularly consistent approach with high control over land use and some discretion to modify uses through permits.
Identifying refugia from climate change
This article highlights how the loose definition of the term ‘refugia’ has led to discrepancies in methods used to assess the vulnerability of species to the current trend of rising global temperatures. The term ‘refugia’ is commonly used without distinguishing between macrorefugia and microrefugia, ex situ refugia and in situ refugia, glacial and interglacial refugia or refugia based on habitat stability and refugia based on climatic stability. It is not always clear which definition is being used, and this makes it difficult to assess the appropriateness of the methods employed. For example, it is crucial to develop accurate fine-scale climate grids when identifying microrefugia, but coarse-scale macroclimate might be adequate for determining macrorefugia. Similarly, identifying in situ refugia might be more appropriate for species with poor dispersal ability but this may overestimate the extinction risk for good dispersers. More care needs to be taken to properly define the context when referring to refugia from climate change so that the validity of methods and the conservation significance of refugia can be assessed.
Guiding concepts for park and wilderness stewardship in an era of global environmental change
The major challenge to stewardship of protected areas is to decide where, when, and how to intervene in physical and biological processes, to conserve what we value in these places. To make such decisions, planners and managers must articulate more clearly the purposes of parks, what is valued, and what needs to be sustained.
Conservation Easements and Climate Change
Governments at all levels are increasingly engaging the challenges posed by global climate change. Conservation easements have provided income tax deductions to their grantors for decades in recognition of certain special benefits afforded by the conservation of land subject to the easement.1 As policy makers search for effective means to address climate change issues, conservation easements may well be recognized as an important tool. However, the current law of conservation easements does not recognize the full potential for carbon capture resulting from land conservation, in part because the tax code limits the types of land that may benefit from such easements. Current laws will need to be revised and expanded to better recognize the climate change benefits that could be achieved from placing land under conservation easements.
Climate-Smart Conservation – Putting Adaptation Principles into Practice
Climate change and the migration capacity of species
In a recent paper, McLachlan et al. presented evidence that migration rates of two tree species at the end of the last glacial (c. 10-20 thousand years ago) were much slower than was previously thought. These results provide an important insight for climate-change impacts studies and suggest that the ability of species to track future climate change is limited. However, the detection of late-glacial refugia close to modern range limits also implies that some of our most catastrophic projections might be overstated.
Climate Change and Conservation: A Primer for Assessing Impacts and Advancing Ecosystem-based Adaptation in The Nature Conservancy
Scarcely a day passes when we don’t hear or read about a new impact of climate change on the environment. Conservancy scientists, practitioners, and managers now find themselves wrestling with how to best adapt our conservation work to a changing climate. Not long ago, many environmental and conservation organizations were reluctant to focus on adaptation over concerns that they would risk drawing attention away from mitigation efforts. This is no longer the case. There is an enormous amount of attention now being paid to adaptation as evidenced by a proliferation of web sites, scientific publications, books, and conferences that address the topic. At the same time, knowledge about impact assessments and adaptation, especially ecosystem‐based adaptation, is highly variable across The Nature Conservancy, and even in the best staffed programs, this is a difficult field with which to stay up‐to‐date. This primer is intended to provide all Conservancy staff with an introduction to climate impacts and ecosystem‐based adaptation, a review of basic definitions, updates on new conservation planning approaches that incorporate adaptation, tools and resources to assist in impact analyses and strategy identification, an overview of ecosystem‐based adaptation in the policy arena, and summary information on adaptation approaches.
Conserving biodiversity under climate change: the rear edge matters
We review recent findings from the fossil record, phylogeography and ecology to illustrate that rear edge populations are often disproportionately important for the survival and evolution of biota. Their ecological features, dynamics and conservation requirements differ from those of populations in other parts of the range, and some commonly recommended conservation practices might therefore be of little use or even counterproductive for rear edge populations.
Climate Adaptation: Mainstreaming in existing Conservation Plans
A Review of Climate-Change Adaptation Strategies for Wildlife Management and Biodiversity Conservation
The scientific literature contains numerous descriptions of observed and potential effects of global climate change on species and ecosystems. In response to anticipated effects of climate change, conservation organizations and government agencies are developing “adaptation strategies” to facilitate the adjustment of human society and ecological systems to altered climate regimes. We reviewed the literature and climatechange adaptation plans that have been developed in United States, Canada, England, M´exico, and South Africa and found 16 general adaptation strategies that relate directly to the conservation of biological diversity. These strategies can be grouped into four broad categories: land and water protection and management; direct species management; monitoring and planning; and law and policy. Tools for implementing these strategies are similar or identical to those already in use by conservationists worldwide (land and water conservation, ecological restoration, agrienvironment schemes, species translocation, captive propagation, monitoring, natural resource planning, and legislation/regulation). Although our review indicates natural resource managers already have many tools that can be used to address climate-change effects, managers will likely need to apply these tools in novel and innovative ways to meet the unprecedented challenges posed by climate change.
