Efficient routes to land conservation given risk of covenant failure
- 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
- 2015. Efficient routes to land conservation given risk of covenant failure. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1033v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1033v1
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.