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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2016

• Title: Conservation as the Invisible Land Use
• Primary Author: Spencer Meyer (Highstead, Inc.)
• Additional Authors: Brian Hall (Harvard Forest); Luca Morreale (Boston University); Joshua Plisinski (Harvard Forest); Jonathan Thompson (Harvard Forest)
• Abstract:

  The trajectory of land protection in New England has changed dramatically since Trustees of Reservations became the first land trust in the U.S. in 1891. New England’s modern land protection movement began to take off in the 1980s with the rise of land trusts. Several key innovations facilitated the surge of land protection. For example, the institutionalization of the conservation easement has allowed conservation organizations to protect more land than ever before for lower per-acre costs. However, conservationists are eager for more and tend to look ahead, rather than behind. Rarely has the conservation community looked back to quantify the conservation outcomes that have come with such great increases in land protection. In this project, we sought to evaluate whether the modern land conservation regime succeeds in conserving what it set out to protect from development. Our objectives were to: (1) develop a spatio-temporal dataset of land protection in New England since 1990; (2) classify the clusters of conservation activity; (3) evaluate the rate and proportion of conservation values (e.g., habitat and biodiversity, ecosystem services; and (4) evaluate the degree to which protected land was focused on areas with high threat of land conversion.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Today, 22% of New England (9.4 million ac) is protected from development, with state-specific figures ranging from 18% in Connecticut to 30% in New Hampshire. Since 1990, there has been an overall protection rate of approximately 185,000 ac/yr, though this varies from 2,300 ac/yr in Rhode Island to 116,000 ac/yr in Maine. We identified six unique clusters of land protection: Big Working Forests, Public Parks, Private Reserves, Public Multiple Use, Private Working Forests, and Small Private Multiple Use (Figure 1). The Big Working Forest cluster was the most dominant, with 2.5 million acres protected, 55% of which was protected in a few large working forest easements in Maine since about 1999. Within states, 77% of Maine acres were represented by the Big Working Forest cluster, while 50% and 52% of acres were categorized as Public Multiple Use in Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively. Fifty percent of all protected land was protected in the last 25 years, in about 17,000 projects, or almost two per day. Overall, 26% of forests and 11% of farmland are now protected.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  More detailed results, including an analysis of the conservation values protected by each cluster, as well as the trends before and after 1990, are forthcoming. The final manuscript will include discussion about whether in practice conservation targets are protected from development, and the degree to which conservation is enacted in places with high threat of development.

• Research Category: Conservation and Management
  Historical and Retrospective Studies


• Figures:
ClustersMap_150dpi.jpg