Exploring landowners' perceptions, motivations and needs for voluntary conservation in a cultural landscape

Abstract

While efforts to reverse the current global environmental crisis increase, we are still experiencing unprecedented rates of species' extinctions. Traditional cultural landscapes can potentially play an important role for biodiversity conservation globally. However, these landscapes are threatened by pressures from global to local socio-economic drivers of change. Many cultural landscapes across the world occur on private land where landowners' environmental stewardship can help support nature conservation. In this study, we applied a place-based collaborative approach to understand the main aspects underlying landowners' relationship with nature, their perceptions of the local social–ecological context and their vision of a desired future to identify the constraints and opportunities to support voluntary private land conservation. The study was conducted in Uruguay, in a traditional cattle ranching cultural landscape, which is a national priority area for the conservation of biodiversity. In Uruguay, approximately 96% of the land is privately owned, while the National System of Protected Areas covers only ~1% of the land. Our results revealed that landowners had a close relationship with nature and considered themselves and their neighbours as local environmental stewards. Landowners were well aware of the importance of nature contributions to their livelihood and lifestyle and were concerned that rural exodus to urban areas and shrubland encroachment would negatively impact the social–ecological context they value and depend upon. Main needs of landowners to support biodiversity conservation were not primarily motivated by economic interests, but more related to the need for support that could enhance land management and social cohesion. Biodiversity conservation goals in this cultural landscape cannot be pursued in isolation from social and rural development goals. Addressing local needs based on already existing links between nature's contributions and people might help support biodiversity conservation in the area. Failing to understand the context and to recognize locally perceived problems could increase the risk of voluntary conservation failure. Our approach and lessons learned can provide insights to actionable research in other cultural landscapes globally. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.