Introduction: Creating a context for landscape-scale conservation planning

Abstract

Over the last 130 years, conservation practitioners have increasingly enlarged their view of the important spatial scales on which to base the development and implementation of conservation plans. For example, even though national parks have been an essential tool in the global conservation toolbox since the late 1800s, it is now well understood that critical conservation goals can only be achieved if parks are viewed as being connected to each other ecologically and embedded within a larger landscape that includes a diverse mixture of ownerships, histories, and uses. The tools for planning at these greater spatial scales, from both the natural and social sciences, are only slowly being developed, tested, and refined. This book represents a step in that process, bringing together lessons on a variety of perspectives-including history, economics, wildlife biology, computer modeling, and climate change science-on how to achieve landscape-scale conservation planning. Although the authors represented in this book primarily describe their work on conservation planning in Eastern North America, these chapters serve as case studies on how conservation planning can be successfully approached in landscapes anywhere in the world. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.