In South Africa, following decades of apartheid, which included racially-based land dispossessions, the post-apartheid government has implemented a land reform programme, which allows people to re-claim the land they were forcefully removed from. Many of these land claims are targeting conservation areas, and this has resulted in the conservation and land reform sectors often coming into confli...

Incentive-based strategies such as conservation easements and short-term management agreements are popular tools for conserving biodiversity on private lands. Billions of dollars are spent by government and private conservation organizations to support land conservation. Although much of conservation biology focuses on reserve design, these methods are often ineffective at optimizing the protec...

Soil conservation is the only known way to protect the productive land. In country like Ethiopia, where droughts and floods cause food scarcity problem, soil and water conservation not only increases crop yield, but also prevents further deterioration of land. Soil and water conservation preserve soil moisture and drain water sustainably to avoid soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients. So...

Landscape scale conservation planning informed by stakeholders is necessary for effective conservation action. We developed a watershed level conservation planning approach by working with two local land trusts that operate in the Upper Oconee subbasin of northeast Georgia. Emphasizing the interdependency of ecological processes and human livelihood to area residents motivates stewardship; henc...

We evaluate the return on investment (ROI) from public land conservation in the state of Minnesota, USA. We use a spatially-explicit modeling tool, the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to estimate how changes in land use and land cover (LULC), including public land acquisitions for conservation, influence the joint provision and value of multiple ecosystem serv...

Conservation of private land through conservation easements, development agreements, and clustered housing has increased greatly as have criticisms of the laws, public programs, and incentives that motivate landowners to use them. Rapid land-use change at the urban-rural interface in Larimer County, Colorado, has given rise to programs that provide a variety of land-conservation options for lan...

The fate of private lands is widely seen as key to the fate of biodiversity in much of the world. Organizations that work to protect biodiversity on private lands often hope that conservation actions on one piece of land will leverage the actions of surrounding landowners. Few researchers have, however, examined whether protected lands do in fact encourage land conservation nearby or how protec...

soil erosion is one of the most important forms of land degradation that threatens continued and sustained agricultural production in ghana. the most severely affected areas are the three northern regions especially upper east region, where large tracts of land have been destroyed by water erosion leading to soil depth reduction and decline in soil fertility. this study was carried out in talen...