Nowhere in the eastern United States is the con ̄ict between the conservation of the rich biological diversity of existing forested landscapes vs. a continued expansion of suburban/exurban development more evident than in the case of Sterling Forest, a 7245 ha tract of land on the New York±New Jersey border. This paper reports on our application of geographic information systems (GIS)-based asse...

The nexus of advocacy and science has been a recurring discussion theme since the earliest days of the Society for Conservation Biology. When Michael Soulé defined conservation as a “mission-oriented discipline,” he succinctly captured the issue. He and others have asked whether biologists on a mission to save ecosystems, ecological communities, species, and populations can provide the value-fr...

Global change poses significant challenges for ecosystem conservation. At regional scales, climate change may lead to extensive shifts in species distributions and widespread extirpations or extinctions. At landscape scales, land use and invasive species disrupt ecosystem function and reduce species richness. However, a lack of spatially explicit models of risk to ecosystems makes it difficult ...

This paper analyzes the fiscal and land value impacts of public open-­‐space conservation in a budget-­‐constrained city. It derives the necessary and sufficient conditions for open-­‐space conservation to increase the level of municipal services and the total land value within the ...

Kane County is located on the western fringe of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Development pressures there have caused rapid increases in land consumption and property values. The county’s Forest Preserve District is actively purchasing land for conservation, but it is important to understand the long-term costs associated with current conservation goals. We developed 18 future scenario...

South Africa is the world’s third most biodiverse country. The system of protected areas, however, does not capture its biodiversity comprehensively. Local land-use planning processes, and the integration of spatial conservation assessments in these processes, have been proposed as an effective approach to conserving biodiversity outside of protected areas. However, an understanding of the day-...

We explored the role of conservation biology in the planning of a natural-heritage system that includes long, wide conservation corridors situated primarily on private lands, and established to connect natural core areas in the Oak Ridges Moraine of Ontario, Canada. We based our review on government documents, semi-structured interviews with participants involved in this land-use planning proce...

To reduce global biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to determine the most efficient allocation of conservation resources. Recently, there has been a growing trend for many governments to supplement public ownership and management of reserves with incentive programs for conservation on private land. At the same time, policies to promote conservation on private land are rarely evaluated i...

Urban growth compromises open space and ecosystem functions. To mitigate the negative effects, some agencies use reserve selection models to identify conservation sites for purchase or retention. Existing models assume that conservation has no impact on nearby land prices. We propose a new integer program that relaxes this assumption via adaptive cost coefficients. Our model accounts for the tw...

BACKGROUND The typical mandate in conservation planning is to identify areas that represent biodiversity targets within the smallest possible area of land or sea, despite the fact that area may be a poor surrogate for the cost of many conservation actions. It is also common for priorities for conservation investment to be identified without regard to the particular conservation action that will...