Subdivision for conservation?

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Creative and strategic approaches are needed to achieve conservation goals in contemporary landscapes. Protected area expansion competes with multiple demands for land and needs to accommodate the socio-economic realities of landscapes to be effective. Smaller planning units can improve targeted acquisitions for protected areas, but ‘subdivision’ used in conservation planning has typically followed ecological patterns. Instead, we suggest that subdividing based on anthropogenic land-development patterns could improve strategic achievement of conservation goals by producing smaller planning units that are also socio-economically relevant. We simulated this approach to subdivision in a New England, USA landscape and evaluated the outcomes for three conservation planning scenarios – protect riparian corridors, protect rare habitats, and protect representative habitats – in the original and subdivided property delineations. For each scenario-delineation combination, we identified protected land expansion solutions that optimized a priority objective within a budget or achieved a conservation target at minimum cost. We used a multi-objective optimization algorithm to identify solutions to navigate tradeoffs between ecological, social, and economic objectives. In our study area, subdivision allowed us to optimize ecological outcomes within a budget and achieve conservation targets at reduced cost. While subdivision solutions were not able to simultaneously improve outcomes for all objectives, they were often able to reduce individual and aggregate outcomes compared to solutions in the originally delineated landscape. Subdivision could be a useful tool for improving implementation of conservation goals because it results in smaller planning units that are able to spatially represent conservation objectives more exactly while remaining socio-economically relevant.