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What Are Landscape Conservation Designs (LCDs)?
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Overview: Science Investments
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What Are Landscape Conservation Designs (LCDs)?
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“Landscape Conservation Designs” or LCDs are one of the unique contributions that LCCs bring to the conservation agenda. They provide the regional conservation perspective to assist local decision-making and collaborative conservation actions. This suite of videos provide a general overview of this emerging aspect of conservation planning and illustrates the iterative nature of conservation planning and design. Both the initial modeling design (LCD1) and the subsequent and more refined LCD2 are presented, which integrates a highly refined aquatic condition scoring system to better evaluate how best to represent a connected system and reflect its current ecological integrity.
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Overview: Science Investments
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What can ecological science tell us about opportunities for carbon sequestration on arid rangelands in the United States?
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Scientific interest in carbon sequestration on rangelands is largely driven by their extent, while the interest of ranchers in the United States centers on opportunities to enhance revenue streams. Rangelands cover approximately 30% of the earth’s ice-free land surface and hold an equivalent amount of the world’s terrestrial carbon. Rangelands are grasslands, shrublands, and savannas and cover 312 million hectares in the United States. On the arid and semi-arid sites typical of rangelands annual fluxes are small and unpredictable over time and space, varying primarily with precipitation, but also with soils and vegetation. There is broad scientific consensus that non-equilibrium ecological models better explain the dynamics of such rangelands than equilibrium models, yet current and proposed carbon sequestration policies and associated grazing management recommendations in the United States often do not incorporate this developing scientific understanding of rangeland dynamics. Carbon uptake on arid and semi-arid rangelands is most often controlled by abiotic factors not easily changed by management of grazing or vegetation. Additionality may be impossible to achieve consistently through management on rangelands near the more xeric end of a rangeland climatic gradient. This point is illustrated by a preliminary examination of efforts to develop voluntary cap and trade markets for carbon credits in the United States, and options including payment for ecosystem services or avoided conversion, and carbon taxation. A preliminary analysis focusing on cap and trade and payment for avoided conversion or ecosystem services illustrates the misalignment between policies targeting vegetation management for enhanced carbon uptake and non-equilibrium carbon dynamics on arid United States rangelands. It is possible that current proposed carbon policy as exemplified by carbon credit exchange or offsets will result in a net increase in emissions, as well as investment in failed management. Rather than focusing on annual fluxes, policy and management initiatives should seek long-term protection of rangelands and rangeland soils to conserve carbon, and a broader range of environmental and social benefits. Non-equilibrium dynamics Arid lands Soil carbon Cap and trade Additionality
Rangeland management
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Climate Science Documents
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What Can I do on Landscape Partnership
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About
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What Does Zero Deforestation Mean?
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Ambiguous defi nitions and metrics create risks
for forest conservation and accountability.
SCIENCE VOL 342
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Climate Science Documents
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What Every Conservation Biologist Should Know about Human Population
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EDITORIAL:CONCLUDING PARAGRAPH:
As with population issues, conservation biologists should ensure that we, as individuals and a professional society, understand the current state of knowledge about consumption and encourage constructive dialogues on consumption and its effects on biodiversity. We are not the first to highlight the issue of consumption (Baltz 1999) in this journal. Although conservation biologists may debate whether U.S. consumption is excessive (Ehrlich & Goulder 2007), the answer is more clear to some. Two months after the 2011 Society for Conservation Biology meeting mentioned above, the first author was in India attending a presentation by Elinor Os- trom (2012), who won the Nobel Prize for her work on management of the commons. At the end of the presentation, a participant asked Dr. Ostrom how we can get the world to talk about consumption as the root cause of the world’s environmental problems. This is the question conservation biologists should ask more often.
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What evidence exists for landbird species-environment relationships in eastern temperate and boreal forests of North America? A systematic map protocol-Additional Information
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In this systematic map, we propose to answer the review question: what evidence exists for bird species-environment relationships in eastern temperate and boreal forests of North America?
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What exactly is the SC Bobwhite Initiative?
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SCDNR biologist Breck Carmichael talks about the history of the SCBI, what it does and how it is working to bring back the whistle in South Carolina.
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Training Resources
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Webinars and Instructional Videos
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Bobwhite Quail Seminar Series
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What is the future of conservation?
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In recent years, some conservation biologists and con- servation organizations have sought to refocus the field of conservation biology by de-emphasizing the goal of protecting nature for its own sake in favor of protecting the environment for its benefits to humans. This ‘new conservation science’ (NCS) has inspired debate among academics and conservationists and motivated funda- mental changes in the world’s largest conservation groups. Despite claims that NCS approaches are sup- ported by biological and social science, NCS has limited support from either. Rather, the shift in motivations and goals associated with NCS appear to arise largely from a belief system holding that the needs and wants of humans should be prioritized over any intrinsic or inherent rights and values of nature.
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Climate Science Documents
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What is the Role of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs)?
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This video focuses on how LCCs and their ecologically defined boundaries came about and then details four key roles of this science and management regional partnership: addressing large-scale threats by facilitating conservation planning, developing natural resource management tools and information, engaging diverse audiences, and building capacity to leverage and share resources.
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Overview: Science Investments
