Managing Land Use and Land-Cover Change: The New Jersey Pinelands Biosphere Reserve

The biosphere reserve is an explicitly spatial approach to ecosystem management. Based on the theory of island biogeography, a biosphere reserve consists of a core area of high ecological value protected by buffers of increasing land-use intensity that provide a gradual transition to surrounding, human-dominated landscapes. This paper addresses implementation of the biosphere reserve associated with the New Jersey Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan (PCMP). We present results of a statistical analysis assessing claims that the plan has managed to direct growth and land-cover change in a manner consistent with environmental objectives. We show that it has had a strong effect in reducing conversion of natural areas in the Pinelands reserve, and that the effect observed is consistent with biosphere theory. In particular, conversion is lowest in the protection core, and increasing in the protective buffers. Evidently, multiple jurisdictions can unite to reduce the pace of regional ecosystem degradation. We conclude the paper with speculations about the prospects for implementing biosphere planning more broadly, given the apparent success of the PCMP.