An economic evaluation framework for land-use-based conservation policy instruments in a changing climate

Climate change is a key threat to biodiversity. To conserve species under climate change, ecologists and conservation scientists suggest 2 main conservation strategies regarding land use: supporting species’ range shifts to enable it to follow its climatic requirements by creating migration pathways, such as corridors and stepping stones, and conserving climate refugia (i.e., existing habitat areas that are somewhat buffered from climate change). The policy instruments that could be used to implement these conservation strategies have yet to be evaluated comprehensively from an economic perspective. The economic analyses of environmental policy instruments are often based on ecological effectiveness and cost-effectiveness criteria. We adapted these general criteria to evaluate policy instruments for species’ conservation under climate change and applied them to a conceptual analysis of land purchases, offsets, and conservation payments. Depending on whether the strategy supporting species’ range shifts or conserving climate refugia is selected, the evaluation of the policy instruments differed substantially. For example, to ensure ecological effectiveness, habitat persistence over time was especially important for climate refugia and was best achieved by a land-purchase policy instrument. In contrast, for the strategy supporting range shifts to be ecologically effective, a high degree of flexibility in the location of conserved sites was required to ensure that new habitat sites can be created in the species’ new range. Offset programs were best suited for that because the location of conservation sites can be chosen comparatively freely and may also be adapted over time.     

Assessing the Distribution and Protection Status of two Types of Cool Environment to Facilitate Their Conservation under Climate Change

Strategies to mitigate climate change can protect different types of cool environments. Two are receiving much attention: protection of ephemeral refuges (i.e., places with low maximum temperatures) and of stable refugia (i.e., places that are cool, have a stable environment, and are isolated). Problematically, they are often treated as equivalents. Careful delineation of their qualities is needed to prevent misdirected conservation initiatives; yet, no one has determined whether protecting one protects the other. We mapped both types of cool environments across a large (～3.4M ha) mixed‐use landscape with a geographic information system and conducted a patch analysis to compare their spatial distributions; examine relations between land use and their size and shape; and assess their current protection status. With a modest, but arbitrary, threshold for demarcating both types of cool environments (i.e., values below the 0.025 quantile) there were 146,523 ha of ephemeral refuge (62,208 ha) and stable refugia (62,319 ha). Ephemeral refuges were generally aggregated at high elevation, and more refuge area occurred in protected areas (55,184 ha) than in unprotected areas (7,024 ha). In contrast, stable refugia were scattered across the landscape, and more stable‐refugium area occurred on unprotected (40,135 ha) than on protected land (22,184 ha). Although sensitivity analysis showed that varying the thresholds that define cool environments affected outcomes, it also exposed the challenge of choosing a threshold for strategies to address climate change; there is no single value that is appropriate for all of biodiversity. The degree of overlap between ephemeral refuges and stable refugia revealed that targeting only the former for protection on currently unprotected land would capture ～17% of stable refugia. Targeting only stable refugia would capture ～54% of ephemeral refuges. Thus, targeting one type of cool environment did not fully protect the other. Evaluación de la Distribución y Estado de Protección de Dos Tipos de Ambientes Fríos para Facilitar su Conservación bajo el Cambio Climático     

Relationships between species richness, evenness, and abundance in a southwestern savanna

Species richness and evenness are components of biological diversity that may or may not be correlated with one another and with patterns of species abundance. We compared these attributes among flowering plants, grasshoppers, butterflies, lizards, summer birds, winter birds, and rodents across 48 plots in the grasslands and mesquite-oak savannas of southeastern Arizona. Species richness and evenness were uncorrelated or weakly negatively correlated for each taxonomic group, supporting the conclusion that richness alone is an incomplete measure of diversity. In each case, richness was positively correlated with one or more measures of abundance. By contrast, evenness usually was negatively correlated with the abundance variables, reflecting the fact that plots with high evenness generally were those where all species present were about equally uncommon. Therefore richness, but not evenness, usually was a positive predictor of places of conservation value, if these are defined as places where species of interest are especially abundant. Species diversity was more positively correlated with evenness than with richness among grasshoppers and flowering plants, in contrast to the other taxonomic groups, and the positive correlations between richness and abundance were comparatively weak for grasshoppers and plants as well. Both of these differences can be attributed to the fact that assemblages of plants and grasshoppers were numerically dominated by small subsets of common species (grasses and certain spur-throated grasshoppers) whose abundances differed greatly among plots in ways unrelated to species richness of the groups as a whole.     

Economics and Land-Use Change in Prioritizing Private Land Conservation

Abstract:  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 protection of biological benefits for conservation programs. Our review of the recent literature on protected-area planning identifies some of the reasons why. We analyzed the site-selection process according to three important components: biological benefits, land costs, and likelihood of land-use change. We compared our benefit-loss-cost targeting approach with more conventional strategies that omit or inadequately address either land costs or likelihood of land-use change. Our proposed strategy aims to minimize the expected loss in biological benefit due to future land-use conversion while considering the full or partial costs of land acquisition. The implicit positive correlation between the likelihood of land-use conversion and cost of land protection means high-vulnerability sites with suitable land quality are typically more expensive than low-vulnerability sites with poor land quality. Therefore, land-use change and land costs need to be addressed jointly to improve spatial targeting strategies for land conservation. This approach can be extended effectively to land trusts and other institutions implementing conservation programs.     

A landscape-scale framework to identify refugia from multiple stressors

From a conservation perspective, quantifying potential refugial capacity has been predominantly focused on climate refugia, which is critical for maintaining the persistence of species and ecosystems. However, protection from other stressors, such as human-induced changes in fire and hydrology, that cause habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation is also necessary to ensure that conservation efforts focused on climate are not undermined by other threats. Thus, conceptual and methodological advances for quantifying potential refugia from multiple anthropogenic stressors are important to support conservation efforts. We devised a new conceptual approach, the domains of refugia, for assessing refugial capacity that identifies areas where exposure to multiple stressors is low. In our framework, patterns of environmental variability (e.g., increased frequency of warm summers), thresholds of resilience, and extent and intensity of stressors are used to identify areas of potential refugia from a suite of ongoing anthropogenic stressors (e.g., changes in fire regime). To demonstrate its utility, we applied the framework to a Southern California landscape. Sites with high refugial capacity (super-refugia sites) had on average 30% fewer extremely warm summers, 20% fewer fire events, 10% less exposure to altered river channels and riparian areas, and 50% fewer recreational trails than the surrounding landscape. Our results suggest that super-refugia sites (∼8200 km²) for some natural communities are underrepresented in the existing protected area network, a finding that can inform efforts to expand protected areas. Our case study highlights how considering exposure to multiple stressors can inform planning and practice to conserve biodiversity in a changing world.     

Identifying climate change refugia for South American biodiversity

Refugia-based conservation offers long-term effectiveness and minimize uncertainty on strategies for climate change adaptation. We used distribution modelling to identify climate change refugia for 617 terrestrial mammals and to quantify the role of protected areas (PAs) in providing refugia across South America. To do so, we compared species potential distribution across different scenarios of climate change, highlighting those regions likely to retain suitable climatic conditions by year 2090, and explored the proportion of refugia inside PAs. Moist tropical forests in high-elevation areas with complex topography concentrated the highest local diversity of species refugia, although regionally important refugia centers occurred elsewhere. Andean–Amazon forests contained climate change refugia for more than half of the continental species’ pool and for up to 87 species locally (17 × 17 km² grid cell). The highlands of the southern Atlantic Forest also included megadiverse refugia for up to 76 species per cell. Almost half of the species that may find refugia in the Atlantic Forest will do so in a single region—the Serra do Mar and Serra do Espinhaço. Most of the refugia we identified, however, were not in PAs, which may contain <6% of the total area of climate change refugia, leaving 129–237 species with no refugia inside the territorial limits of PAs of any kind. Our results reveal a dismal scenario for the level of refugia protection in some of the most biodiverse regions of the world. Nonetheless, because refugia tend to be in high-elevation, topographically complex, and remote areas, with lower anthropogenic pressure, formally protecting them may require a comparatively modest investment.     

Conservation Development Practices,Extent, and Land‐Use Effects in the United States

Abstract: Conservation development projects combine real‐estate development with conservation of land and other natural resources. Thousands of such projects have been conducted in the United States and other countries through the involvement of private developers, landowners, land trusts, and government agencies. Previous research has demonstrated the potential value of conservation development for conserving species, ecological functions, and other resource values on private lands, especially when traditional sources of conservation funding are not available. Nevertheless, the aggregate extent and effects of conservation development were previously unknown. To address this gap, we estimated the extent and trends of conservation development in the United States and characterized its key attributes to understand its aggregate contribution to land‐conservation and growth‐management objectives. We interviewed representatives from land trusts, planning agencies, and development companies, searched the Internet for conservation development projects and programs, and compiled existing databases of conservation development projects. We collected data on 3884 projects encompassing 1.38 million ha. About 43% of the projects targeted the conservation of specific plant or animal species or ecological communities of conservation concern; 84% targeted the protection of native ecosystems representative of the project area; and 42% provided buffers to existing protected areas. The percentage of protected land in conservation development projects ranged from <40% to >99%, and the effects of these projects on natural resources differed widely. We estimate that conservation development projects have protected roughly 4 million ha of land in the United States and account for about 25% of private‐land conservation activity nationwide.     

Land trust evaluation of progress toward conservation goals

In the United States local land trusts preserve and conserve land to protect water quality and supply, farmlands, habitat for native plants and animals, areas of cultural or historical significance, and scenic views. We surveyed the 24 active, local land trusts in North Carolina (U.S.A.) to determine how they report progress toward attaining such conservation goals. Twenty-two land trusts responded to our survey. Of these, eight reported developing specific conservation goals for all of the properties they protect, five identified conservation targets on all properties, and two reported monitoring biological indicators on all of their protected properties. On the basis of these results, we believe most of the land trusts surveyed could not determine whether they were meeting conservation goals because most did not identify explicit, measurable goals and monitor progress toward them. Instead they reported success in terms of the amount of land protected and money raised. We think this is a lost opportunity for land trusts to build sound approaches to environmental management, engage the public, entice new donors, and attain funding for additional conservation activities. We propose conservation professionals help local land trusts adopt the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation, a framework developed by a consortium of international conservation organizations, to develop conservation goals and measure whether the goals are achieved.     

Contribution of warm habitat to cold-water fisheries

A central tenet of landscape ecology is that mobile species depend on complementary habitats, which are insufficient in isolation, but combine to support animals through the full annual cycle. However, incorporating the dynamic needs of mobile species into conservation strategies remains a challenge, particularly in the context of climate adaptation planning. For cold-water fishes, it is widely assumed that maximum temperatures are limiting and that summer data alone can predict refugia and population persistence. We tested these assumptions in populations of redband rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss newberrii) in an arid basin, where the dominance of hot, hyperproductive water in summer emulates threats of climate change predicted for cold-water fish in other basins. We used telemetry to reveal seasonal patterns of movement and habitat use. Then, we compared contributions of hot and cool water to growth with empirical indicators of diet and condition (gut contents, weight–length ratios, electric phase angle, and stable isotope signatures) and a bioenergetics model. During summer, trout occurred only in cool tributaries or springs (<20 °C) and avoided Upper Klamath Lake (>25 °C). During spring and fall, ≥65% of trout migrated to the lake (5–50 km) to forage. Spring and fall growth (mean [SD] 0.58% per day [0.80%] and 0.34 per day [0.55%], respectively) compensated for a net loss of energy in cool summer refuges (–0.56% per day [0.55%]). In winter, ≥90% of trout returned to tributaries (25–150 km) to spawn. Thus, although perennially cool tributaries supported thermal refuge and spawning, foraging opportunities in the seasonally hot lake ultimately fueled these behaviors. Current approaches to climate adaptation would prioritize the tributaries for conservation but would devalue critical foraging habitat because the lake is unsuitable and unoccupied during summer. Our results empirically demonstrate that warm water can fuel cold-water fisheries and challenge the common practice of identifying refugia based only on summer conditions.     

Mapping Human and Social Dimensions of Conservation Opportunity for the Scheduling of Conservation Action on Private Land

Abstract Spatial prioritization techniques are applied in conservation‐planning initiatives to allocate conservation resources. Although typically they are based on ecological data (e.g., species, habitats, ecological processes), increasingly they also include nonecological data, mostly on the vulnerability of valued features and economic costs of implementation. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of conservation actions implemented through conservation‐planning initiatives is a function of the human and social dimensions of social‐ecological systems, such as stakeholders’ willingness and capacity to participate. We assessed human and social factors hypothesized to define opportunities for implementing effective conservation action by individual land managers (those responsible for making day‐to‐day decisions on land use) and mapped these to schedule implementation of a private land conservation program. We surveyed 48 land managers who owned 301 land parcels in the Makana Municipality of the Eastern Cape province in South Africa. Psychometric statistical and cluster analyses were applied to the interview data so as to map human and social factors of conservation opportunity across a landscape of regional conservation importance. Four groups of landowners were identified, in rank order, for a phased implementation process. Furthermore, using psychometric statistical techniques, we reduced the number of interview questions from 165 to 45, which is a preliminary step toward developing surrogates for human and social factors that can be developed rapidly and complemented with measures of conservation value, vulnerability, and economic cost to more‐effectively schedule conservation actions. This work provides conservation and land management professionals direction on where and how implementation of local‐scale conservation should be undertaken to ensure it is feasible.     

Evaluating Private Land Conservation in the Cape Lowlands,South Africa

Abstract: Evaluation is important for judiciously allocating limited conservation resources and for improving conservation success through learning and strategy adjustment. We evaluated the application of systematic conservation planning goals and conservation gains from incentive‐based stewardship interventions on private land in the Cape Lowlands and Cape Floristic Region, South Africa. We collected spatial and nonspatial data (2003–2007) to determine the number of hectares of vegetation protected through voluntary contractual and legally nonbinding (informal) agreements with landowners; resources spent on these interventions; contribution of the agreements to 5‐ and 20‐year conservation goals for representation and persistence in the Cape Lowlands of species and ecosystems; and time and staff required to meet these goals. Conservation gains on private lands across the Cape Floristic Region were relatively high. In 5 years, 22,078 ha (27,800 ha of land) and 46,526 ha (90,000 ha of land) of native vegetation were protected through contracts and informal agreements, respectively. Informal agreements often were opportunity driven and cheaper and faster to execute than contracts. All contractual agreements in the Cape Lowlands were within areas of high conservation priority (identified through systematic conservation planning), which demonstrated the conservation plan's practical application and a high level of overlap between resource investment (approximately R1.14 million/year in the lowlands) and priority conservation areas. Nevertheless, conservation agreements met only 11% of 5‐year and 9% of 20‐year conservation goals for Cape Lowlands and have made only a moderate contribution to regional persistence of flora to date. Meeting the plan's conservation goals will take three to five times longer and many more staff members to maintain agreements than initially envisaged.     

Effect of biogeographic history on population vulnerability in European amphibians

The genetic diversity of populations, which contributes greatly to their adaptive potential, is negatively affected by anthropogenic habitat fragmentation and destruction. However, continental‐scale losses of genetic diversity also resulted from the population expansions that followed the end of the last glaciation, an element that is rarely considered in a conservation context. We addressed this issue in a meta‐analysis in which we compared the spatial patterns of vulnerability of 18 widespread European amphibians in light of phylogeographic histories (glacial refugia and postglacial routes) and anthropogenic disturbances. Conservation statuses significantly worsened with distances from refugia, particularly in the context of industrial agriculture; human population density also had a negative effect. These findings suggest that features associated with the loss of genetic diversity in post‐glacial amphibian populations (such as enhanced fixation load or depressed adaptive potential) may increase their susceptibility to current threats (e.g., habitat fragmentation and pesticide use). We propose that the phylogeographic status of populations (i.e., refugial vs. post‐glacial) should be considered in conservation assessments for regional and national red lists.     

Land use and land cover in a transitioning militarized landscape

The repurposing of military lands is common in many parts of the world and presents a variety of conservation opportunities. This study examines land cover at Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge, Indiana (U.S.A.) as it transitioned from military proving ground to wildlife refuge from 1985 to 2013. We use remote sensing, semi-structured interviews, and a review of planning and management documents to examine this transition. Limited change in land cover composition and distribution are detected, despite changes in use and management. This landscape similarity relates to similarities in land management practices, and the impact of landscape history on current management practices. The findings suggest that military use and conservation objectives at this site yield similar land covers and are not necessarily in contrast to each other. As military base closures continue, the potential to maintain and expand conservation opportunities on these lands will likely grow in importance.     

Assessing the Ecological and Social Benefits of Private Land Conservation in Colorado

Abstract: 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 landowners. As of January 2005, roughly 60% of Larimer County was publicly owned, and 3% or 16,200 ha was privately owned with some form of protection. We used document analysis, a landowner survey, targeted interviews, and a landscape‐level spatial analysis to analyze the patterns, quantities, and qualities of private land conservation. We created a jurisdiction‐specific typology of desired benefits from local government‐planning documents to help evaluate conservation parcels. Most easements and other conservation documents used general terms and did not describe the site‐specific values of the land being conserved. Landowners were able to describe some benefits not included in parcel‐specific documents, and our spatial analysis revealed parcel‐specific and cumulative conservation benefits such as the amount of buffering, infill, connectivity, protected agricultural land, riparian protection, and other benefits not referenced by either documents or landowners. Conservation benefits provided by a parcel varied depending on its geographic location, the specific institution such as a land trust or open space program that a landowner worked with, and the conservation mechanism used, such as voluntary easement or residential clustering requirements. The methods we used provide a template for jurisdictions wishing to undertake a similar analysis. Our findings may assist other jurisdictions and institutions interested in improving how land‐conservation benefits are described; justify and inform future investments in private land conservation; assist local governments and other institutions with the assessment of program effectiveness; and be useful for conservation planners who wish to become more involved in on‐the‐ground implementation of conservation actions.     

Pastoralism,nature conservation and ecological sustainability in Western Australia's southern shrubland rangelands

Two major issues are discussed in this paper. The first is the commitment of Federal and State Governments to the maintenance of biodiversity and nature conservation through their endorsement of conservation strategies. Based on a rangeland biophysical resource inventory survey (Pringle et al., 1994) it is contended that existing nature conservation reserves are not representative of the biological diversity in the region. In 1990, less than 1% of the survey area was under nature reservation. Whilst 13 of 17 land types are present in reserves, most of the reserves consist of land types least suitable for pastoralism (but not necessarily lacking conservation value). The land types most subject to preferential grazing and most threatened from a nature conservation perspective are poorly (three types) or not (four types) represented, and certainly not replicated, in nature reserves of the survey area, which exceeds 100 000 km2. Of the 23 priority plant species for nature conservation occurring in the survey area, 21 are not known to occur in nature reserves. Nature conservation in the area needs to improve because of the unrepresentativeness of the existing nature reserves and the absence of numerous priority plant species for nature conservation from these areas. We should recognize that reservation is but one nature conservation strategy. Viewed as a land tenure issue, this paper presents a case for a more representative nature reserve system, and substantial changes in outlook towards off-reserve nature conservation. First, an integrated appraisal of findings from rangeland and biological surveys is required. Together they provide a strong foundation for nature conservation planning, from which a more representative nature reserve system can be planned. Given that off-reserve nature conservation values are still likely to be substantial, partly as a result of compromise with existing land uses, new approaches to land management, sensitive to these values, may be required.The second major issue concerns the success of maintaining regional biological diversity in the arid shrubland rangelands of Western Australia, which will be strongly influenced by the use of the semi-natural matrix of lands under pastoral management. In six suggested opportunities, this paper addresses how this use may be achieved. Central to the ideas is a regional approach in which all stakeholders can contribute to, and have ownership of, regional environmental management plans. This paper emphasizes the role that conservative pastoral management might be able to play and some approaches to encourage more widespread participation of pastoralists in nature conservation management.     

Use of Inverse Spatial Conservation Prioritization to Avoid Biological Diversity Loss Outside Protected Areas

Globally expanding human land use sets constantly increasing pressure for maintenance of biological diversity and functioning ecosystems. To fight the decline of biological diversity, conservation science has broken ground with methods such as the operational model of systematic conservation planning (SCP), which focuses on design and on‐the‐ground implementation of conservation areas. The most commonly used method in SCP is reserve selection that focuses on the spatial design of reserve networks and their expansion. We expanded these methods by introducing another form of spatial allocation of conservation effort relevant for land‐use zoning at the landscape scale that avoids negative ecological effects of human land use outside protected areas. We call our method inverse spatial conservation prioritization. It can be used to identify areas suitable for economic development while simultaneously limiting total ecological and environmental effects of that development at the landscape level by identifying areas with highest economic but lowest ecological value. Our method is not based on a priori targets, and as such it is applicable to cases where the effects of land use on, for example, individual species or ecosystem types are relatively small and would not lead to violation of regional or national conservation targets. We applied our method to land‐use allocation to peat mining. Our method identified a combination of profitable production areas that provides the needed area for peat production while retaining most of the landscape‐level ecological value of the ecosystem. The results of this inverse spatial conservation prioritization are being used in land‐use zoning in the province of Central Finland.     

Assessing the shelf life of cost‐efficient conservation plans for species at risk across gradients of agricultural land use

High costs of land in agricultural regions warrant spatial prioritization approaches to conservation that explicitly consider land prices to produce protected‐area networks that accomplish targets efficiently. However, land‐use changes in such regions and delays between plan design and implementation may render optimized plans obsolete before implementation occurs. To measure the shelf life of cost‐efficient conservation plans, we simulated a land‐acquisition and restoration initiative aimed at conserving species at risk in Canada's farmlands. We accounted for observed changes in land‐acquisition costs and in agricultural intensity based on censuses of agriculture taken from 1986 to 2011. For each year of data, we mapped costs and areas of conservation priority designated using Marxan. We compared plans to test for changes through time in the arrangement of high‐priority sites and in the total cost of each plan. For acquisition costs, we measured the savings from accounting for prices during site selection. Land‐acquisition costs and land‐use intensity generally rose over time independent of inflation (24–78%), although rates of change were heterogeneous through space and decreased in some areas. Accounting for spatial variation in land price lowered the cost of conservation plans by 1.73–13.9%, decreased the range of costs by 19–82%, and created unique solutions from which to choose. Despite the rise in plan costs over time, the high conservation priority of particular areas remained consistent. Delaying conservation in these critical areas may compromise what optimized conservation plans can achieve. In the case of Canadian farmland, rapid conservation action is cost‐effective, even with moderate levels of uncertainty in how to implement restoration goals.     

Improving inferences about private land conservation by accounting for incomplete reporting

Private lands provide key habitat for imperiled species and are core components of function protectected area networks; yet, their incorporation into national and regional conservation planning has been challenging. Identifying locations where private landowners are likely to participate in conservation initiatives can help avoid conflict and clarify trade-offs between ecological benefits and sociopolitical costs. Empirical, spatially explicit assessment of the factors associated with conservation on private land is an emerging tool for identifying future conservation opportunities. However, most data on private land conservation are voluntarily reported and incomplete, which complicates these assessments. We used a novel application of occupancy models to analyze the occurrence of conservation easements on private land. We compared multiple formulations of occupancy models with a logistic regression model to predict the locations of conservation easements based on a spatially explicit social–ecological systems framework. We combined a simulation experiment with a case study of easement data in Idaho and Montana (United States) to illustrate the utility of the occupancy framework for modeling conservation on private land. Occupancy models that explicitly accounted for variation in reporting produced estimates of predictors that were substantially less biased than estimates produced by logistic regression under all simulated conditions. Occupancy models produced estimates for the 6 predictors we evaluated in our case study that were larger in magnitude, but less certain than those produced by logistic regression. These results suggest that occupancy models result in qualitatively different inferences regarding the effects of predictors on conservation easement occurrence than logistic regression and highlight the importance of integrating variable and incomplete reporting of participation in empirical analysis of conservation initiatives. Failure to do so can lead to emphasizing the wrong social, institutional, and environmental factors that enable conservation and underestimating conservation opportunities in landscapes where social norms or institutional constraints inhibit reporting.     

Estimating the Effect of Protected Lands on the Development and Conservation of Their Surroundings

Abstract:  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 protected lands affect development in the surrounding landscape. Using spatiotemporal data sets on land cover and land protection for three sites (western North Carolina, central Massachusetts, and central Arizona), we examined whether the existence of a protected area correlates with an increased rate of nearby land conservation or a decreased rate of nearby land development. At all sites, newly protected conservation areas tended to cluster close to preexisting protected areas. This may imply that the geography of contemporary conservation actions is influenced by past decisions on land protection, often made for reasons far removed from concerns about biodiversity. On the other hand, we found no evidence that proximity to protected areas correlates with a reduced rate of nearby land development. Indeed, on two of our three sites the development rate was significantly greater in regions with more protected land. This suggests that each conservation action should be justified and valued largely for what is protected on the targeted land, without much hope of broader conservation leverage effects.