Abstract
Conservation easements have emerged as an important tool for land trusts and government agencies aiming to conserve private land in the United States. Despite the increase in public investment in conservation easement acquisitions, little is known about their conservation outcomes, particularly at a landscape scale. The nine-county San Francisco Bay Area exemplifies a complex conservation context: 190 organizations hold 24% of the land base in some type of protection status. Using a detailed protected lands database, we compared the contributions of conservation easements and fee-simple protected areas to ecological, agricultural, and public recreation benefits. We found that conservation easements were more likely to conserve grasslands, oak woodlands, and agricultural land, whereas fee-simple properties were more likely to conserve chaparral and scrub, redwoods, and urban areas. Conservation easements contributed to open space connectivity but were unlikely to be integrated into local land-use plans or provide public recreation. In particular, properties held by land trusts were less likely to allow for public recreation than were public lands. Conservation easements held by land trusts and special districts complemented fee-simple lands and provided greater conservation of some ecological communities and agricultural lands than fee-simple properties. Spatial databases of protected areas that include conservation easements are necessary for conservation planning and assessment.
Highlights
The use of conservation easements by land trusts and government agencies to protect natural and agricultural resources has grown dramatically since the 1980s (Land Trust Alliance 2005)
Consistent with our expectation that public lands are generally steeper than private lands, we found that the fee-simple properties held by land trusts and special districts were significantly steeper than the conservation easements held by those agencies, the mean difference was only 4.1% slope (n = 727, t = 3.76, P < 0.01)
In the San Francisco Bay Area, we found differences between institutions and the acquisition tools used in land conservation
Summary
The use of conservation easements by land trusts and government agencies to protect natural and agricultural resources has grown dramatically since the 1980s (Land Trust Alliance 2005). Held conservation easements originate in federal programs, state and regional acquisition and regulatory programs, and local city and county efforts to secure open space within a land-use planning framework. Nonprofit organizations operating at national, regional, local, and neighborhood, i.e., homeowner, scales hold conservation easements to meet natural, agricultural, or scenic protection goals. Land acquisition by public agencies and nonprofit organizations has typically occurred through the reservation of land from the public domain and the acquisition of fee-simple properties, rather than through conservation easements. Land acquisition may result from a regulatory process, such as local land-use planning, subdivision planning, or habitat conservation plans for endangered species (Lippmann 2004)
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