Local and regional private land trusts are among the most important and most numerous conservation actors in contemporary America, and conservation easements are perhaps the key land conservation tools used by these trusts. This article examines various criticisms and proposals for reform of current conservation easement practice in light of a detailed survey of conservation easements held by local and regional land trusts in Massachusetts. More specifically, it provides important detail on contemporary conservation easement practice, considers the interaction between contemporary practice and the abstract concerns raised in the academic debate, and offers some suggestions for reform and further study.

Reconciling Development and Natural Beauty: The Promise and Dilemma of Conservation Easements

We analyze optimal budget allocations to acquire protected areas for carbon storage while balancing risk and return from protection under economic growth uncertainty in a local community. Our study is the first to explore how risk of uncertain economic growth affects cost of protected area acquisition using real estate values at the parcel level, enabling us to estimate the site-specific opportunity cost of carbon storage. The Pareto optimal trade-off frontier between the expected carbon storage benefit and its variance provides a continuum of risk-return combinations. The pattern of the trade-off relationship implies that risk mitigation is less costly in terms of foregone expected benefit when risk is higher than when it is lower. Our results also find that the difference in cluster-specific budget allocations between the strong economic growth scenario and the weak economic growth scenario subsequently decreases between the point of expected benefit maximization and the point of variance minimization. Our findings of optimal hectares of land for protected area acquisition for carbon storage and corresponding benefits and costs serve as an empirically informed knowledge base to help a local community prioritize acquisition of potential protected areas for carbon storage under economic growth uncertainty.

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Optimal Budget Allocations for Protected Area Acquisition To Store Carbon in a Local Community Under Economic Growth Uncertainty

Abstract The drivers of individual landowners’ adoption of conservation easements have been well-studied. However, the role and relative predictive power of drivers at the community, rather than individual, scale have not. This study employs diffusion of innovations theory to examine easement adoption in Virginia at the community scale, using geospatial analysis as well as surveys and interviews with easement practitioners. Geospatial modeling results suggest that community-level easement likelihood can be predicted well, but community-level predictors differ from typical individual-level predictors. The literature suggests that easement adopters are typically wealthier, more educated, and less land-dependent. The communities containing easements in our study were generally less wealthy, less educated, and more economically dependent on the land. Data collected from practitioners highlighted the importance of community-scale forces in predicting patterns of easement adoption, including community cohesion, aspects of local land-use planning, and the influence of change agents and opinion leaders.

Exploring the Role of Community-Level Factors in the Adoption of Conservation Easements: A Virginia Case Study

Academic Over the past several decades conservation easements have seen immense growth in their popularity. There are now over 40 million acres of easement land in the United States, up from only 1.4 million in 1998. A significant body of research exists on easements, factors that lead to their adoption, their consequences and effectiveness, and problems that arise from their use, among other topics. Our study contributes to this literature by exploring community and systemlevel effects on easement adoption, using Virginia as a case study, and applying a novel approach that incorporates spatial analysis and the insights of conservation professionals. The purpose of our research was to explore whether community-level factors affect easement adoption decisions, and what those factors are. Previously established variables were investigated to gauge their relationship to easement occurrence when scaled up to the community level, as well as to test our ability to make predictions about where easements should be most likely to occur. Spatial market segmentation data was also incorporated into this analysis to determine whether it could augment our understanding of community-level factors and predictive ability. Statistical models produced were reasonably predictive. However, we suspect that this was the case for different reasons at our community scale of analysis than at the individual landowner level examined in previous research. We used surveys and interviews with easement professionals to further explore additional variables that might explain adoption patterns. Results indicate the importance of system-level factors including change agents, opinion leaders, and local government and land-use planning. Abstract Public Conservation easements are an increasingly common form of land protection. Unlike traditional conservation methods that involve directly purchasing and protecting land, such as national parks and forests, conservation easements allow private individuals to maintain ownership of their property while also ensuring that that land is conserved, remaining both undeveloped and unsubdivided. Our research was aimed at investigating whether communitylevel social factors might affect the ability and interest of landowners to adopt easements, and we Public Conservation easements are an increasingly common form of land protection. Unlike traditional conservation methods that involve directly purchasing and protecting land, such as national parks and forests, conservation easements allow private individuals to maintain ownership of their property while also ensuring that that land is conserved, remaining both undeveloped and unsubdivided. Our research was aimed at investigating whether communitylevel social factors might affect the ability and interest of landowners to adopt easements, and we focused our efforts on the state of Virginia. A combination of information collected through surveys and interviews with conservation professionals from across the state and publically available data were used to address the topic. Our results contained important lessons for conservationists and researchers alike. One such lesson was the apparent propensity for landowners who are more likely to adopt easements to have characteristics different, and sometimes even opposite, the general characteristics of people living in their surrounding community. Other lessons included the identification of community-level factors that affect the likelihood of easement adoption, including the presence of influential community members, and the support or opposition of local governments and land-use planning to easements.

Exploring the “Where” and the “Why” of Conservation Easements: The Role of Community-level Factors in the Likelihood of Adoption

Abstract Do more natural settings improve students’ learning? We collected surveys immediately following 283 U.S.-based environmental education (EE) field trip programs for youth and used land cover data to examine the relationship between levels of naturalness, defined as the percentage of natural land cover of the EE field trip site, and student learning outcomes. We also examined whether differences in levels of naturalness between students’ day-to-day environment and the field trip setting were related to student learning outcomes. When controlling for grade and race, both levels of naturalness and novel levels of naturalness accounted for approximately 4% of the variance in student outcomes suggesting that other field trip characteristics are more influential.

Tyler Lee Hemby

Papers

Exploring the “Where” and the “Why” of Conservation Easements: The Role of Community-level Factors in the Likelihood of Adoption

Exploring the Role of Community-Level Factors in the Adoption of Conservation Easements: A Virginia Case Study

Is naturalness associated with positive learning outcomes during environmental education field trips?