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Efficient routes to land conservation given risk of covenant failure

,
  Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1033v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Biodiversity, Biogeography, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Environmental Sciences
Keywords
biodiversity conservation, conservation covenant, ecosystem services, landscape prioritization, conservation easement
Copyright
© 2015 Schuster et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Schuster R, Arcese P. 2015. Efficient routes to land conservation given risk of covenant failure. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1033v1

Abstract

Conservation initiatives to protect valued species communities in human-dominated landscapes face challenges linked to their potential costs. Conservation covenants on private land may represent a cost-effective alternative to land purchase, although many questions on the long-term monitoring and enforcement costs of covenants and the risk of violation or legal challenges remain unquantified. We explore the cost-effectiveness of conservation covenants, defined here as the fraction of the high-biodiversity landscape potentially protected via investment in covenants versus land purchase. We show that covenant violation and dispute rates substantially affect the estimated long-term cost-effectiveness of a covenant versus land purchase strategy. Our results suggest the long-term cost-effectiveness of conservation covenants may outperform land purchase as a strategy to protect biodiversity as long as disputes and legal challenges are low, but point to a critical need for monitoring data to reduce uncertainty and maximize conservation investment cost-effectiveness.

Author Comment

This will be a submission to PeerJ for review.

Supplemental Information

Study region figure and analysis R script

This supplementary material includes two Appendices. In Appendix S1 we include a figure of the Georgia Basin of British Columbia, Canada, highlighting the study region. In Appendix S2 we provide the R script that we used for our analysis and simulations.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.1033v1/supp-1

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Richard Schuster conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Peter Arcese conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Animal Ethics

The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

Permits or permission for the use of bird point count locations were obtained from Parks Canada (locations in National Park Reserves), private land owners (locations on private land), or did not require specific permission as they occurred on public right of ways (e.g., roadsides, regional parks). As private land owners did not want their information posted publically please contact the authors for contact details. The field studies did not involve endangered or protected species. This study did not require approval from an Animal Care and Use Committee because it was a non-invasive observational field study, and did not involve the capture and handling of wild animals.

Field Study Permissions

The following information was supplied relating to field study approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

Permits or permission for the use of bird point count locations were obtained from Parks Canada (locations in National Park Reserves), private land owners (locations on private land), or did not require specific permission as they occurred on public right of ways (e.g., roadsides, regional parks). As private land owners did not want their information posted publically please contact the authors for contact details. The field studies did not involve endangered or protected species. This study did not require approval from an Animal Care and Use Committee because it was a non-invasive observational field study, and did not involve the capture and handling of wild animals.

Funding

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canada, W. and H. Hesse, the University of British Columbia, and an Endeavour Research Fellowship, Australia (RS) funded this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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