Sharpening the skein: assessing and targeting perpetual private land conservation programs

Kaylan Kemink assessed outcomes from a private land conservation program in the US Prairie Pothole Region. Her results supported including dynamics into prioritisation strategies, the need for impact evaluation, and highlighted non-financial motives for leveraging participation in the future. Regional non-profit organizations are using the results of her study

Survival, habitat use, and movement of resident and translocated greater prairie-chickens

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on May 30, 2013).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Thesis advisor: Dr. Dylan C. KeslerIncludes bibliographical references.M.S. University of Missouri--Columbia 2012."May 2012."Few rigorous studies have evaluated translocation as a management tool, despite frequent use of the technique in conservation settings. We used radiotelemetry to compare survival, habitat use, and movements among 58 resident and 54 translocated greater prairie-chickens (Tympanuchus cupido) between March and August, 2010 and 2011 within a landscape structured after the Partners in Flight Bird Conservation Area Model (PIF model). Results indicated lower survival in translocated prairie-chickens than in residents, and in agricultural and private grassland habitats than in core protected prairie habitats. Habitat use did not differ between resident and translocated birds and a ranking of habitat preference indicated that birds preferred prairie, agriculture, private grassland and wooded habitats sequentially. We also found that fences and trees reduced the amount of useable space within prairie, as birds avoided areas near these features. Post-translocation movements of birds were exploratory, search oriented, and substantially larger and more frequent than those of resident birds. Our research illustrates that the survival and movement of recently translocated birds differs from resident birds. Our results also question the efficacy of the PIF model for prairie-chickens, as birds preferred core prairie habitats over other habitats within the landscape and they also experienced lower survival outside of these core areas

Adapting to Changes in Design Requirements Using Set‐Based Design

Ship design is a highly intensive and complex process mainly due to the large number of components and competing requirements. With advancement in technology, design, and evaluation processes, more emphasis has been placed on obtaining not just a feasible design, but also an optimal one. Advanced design methods such as set‐based design (SBD) can provide a structured approach to evaluating the design space in order to make accurate and informed decisions toward a more globally optimal design. This paper presents the general application of the SBD process for US Naval vessels as well as a specialized focus on changes in design requirements. Specifically, the two main objectives are an evaluation of how delaying decisions using SBD could cause higher adaptability to changes later in the design process and development of a tradeoff space for evaluating reduced sets. A design experiment that simulated cycles of the SBD process was developed and implemented to provide insight into this objective. The different stages of the experiment included determining intersections between design components in the design space, narrowing variable sets to eliminate infeasible regions, and evaluating the effects of changing design requirements.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90342/1/j.1559-3584.2011.00331.x.pd

Integrating dynamic processes into waterfowl conservation prioritization tools

Aim: Traditional approaches for including species' distributions in conservation planning have presented them as long-term averages of variation. Like these approaches, the main waterfowl conservation targeting tool in the United States Prairie Pothole Region (US PPR) is based primarily on long-term averaged distributions of breeding pairs. While this tool has supported valuable conservation, it does not explicitly consider spatiotemporal changes in spring wetland availability and does not assess wetland availability during the brood rearing period. We sought to develop a modelling approach and targeting tool that incorporated these types of dynamics for breeding waterfowl pairs and broods. This goal also presented an opportunity for us to compare predictions from a traditional targeting tool based on long-term averages to predictions from spatiotemporal models. Such a comparison facilitated tests of the underlying assumption that this traditional targeting tool could provide an effective surrogate measure for conservation objectives such as brood abundance and climate refugia. Location: US PPR. Methods: We developed spatiotemporal models of waterfowl pair and brood abundance within the US PPR. We compared the distributions predicted by these models and assessed similarity with the averaged pair data that is used to develop the current waterfowl targeting tool. Results: Results demonstrated low similarity and correlation between the averaged pair data and spatiotemporal brood and pair models. The spatiotemporal pair model distributions did not serve as better surrogates for brood abundance than the averaged pair data. Main conclusions: Our study underscored the contributions that the current targeting tool has made to waterfowl conservation but also suggested that conservation plans in the region would benefit from the consideration of inter- and intra-annual dynamics. We suggested that using only the averaged pair data and derived products might result in the omission of 58% - 88% of important pair and brood habitat from conservation plans. [Correction added on 5 February 2021, after first online publication: ‘Results’ text has been modified and the ‘Main conclusions’ omission percentages have been corrected.

Exploring motives for participation in a perpetual easement program: Going beyond financial incentives

Private land conservation has become an important element of the global conservation portfolio. Often, landowners are encouraged to participate in private land conservation with financial incentives. However, there is a concern that financial incentives may be limited given the ephemeral nature of funding. Financial incentives also have the potential to crowd-out participation from landowners motivated by altruistic factors rather than financial ones. These concerns underscore the importance of understanding drivers of participation in conservation programs. While there is a plethora of studies examining motivations for participation in term-limited conservation programs, there are far fewer that look at landowners' reasons for participating in perpetual programs. We examined landowners' non-financial motivations for participation in a United States Fish and Wildlife perpetual easement program using several analytical approaches. We first looked at correlations between the likelihood of participation in the easement program and survey respondent's beliefs, values, norms, and perceived behavioral control using a Bayesian regression analysis. Next, using a cluster analysis we segmented our landowner sample into two groups, tested for differences between the group theoretical constructs, and looked for patterns in geographic distributions of the clusters. Our results suggested that individuals who accepted responsibility for habitat protection and recognized habitat threats were more likely to have participated in the easement program. We did not find significant demographic patterns in our cluster analysis but did see differences across the tested theoretical constructs of theory of planned behavior and value-belief norm theory. Further exploration of variation revealed potential for conservation opportunities and allowed us to make recommendations for future policy actions

A synthesis of knowledge about motives for participation in perpetual conservation easements

Perpetual conservation easements are a popular method in some countries for addressing conservation goals. Landowner participation plays a key role in the development of these agreements. Despite the importance of involvement by landowners, no recent efforts have been made to synthesize information about the motivations for participation in perpetual easement programs. As a result, the literature lacks a framework to guide future case studies that would facilitate comparisons and generalizations. To this end, we reviewed 43 studies that investigated individual motivations to participate in perpetual conservation easements, and categorized motivations using Ostrom's social–ecological framework. We identified a strong tendency among studies to focus only on local-scale processes involving landowners, with little consideration of broader-scale influences. We also highlight several cross-study trends and gaps in the literature where future research would prove valuable

Insulin resistance pathogenesis in visceral fat and gut organisms

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Assessing prioritization measures for a private land conservation program in the U.S. Prairie Pothole Region

Private land conservation has become an important tool for protecting biodiversity and habitat, but methods for prioritizing and scheduling conservation on private land are still being developed. While return on investment methods have been suggested as a potential path forward, the different processes linking private landscapes to the socioeconomic systems in which they are embedded create unique challenges for scheduling conservation with this approach. We investigated a range of scheduling approaches within a return on investment framework for breeding waterfowl and broods in the Prairie Pothole Region of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana. Current conservation targeting for waterfowl in the region focuses mostly on the distribution and abundance of breeding waterfowl. We tested whether MaxGain approaches for waterfowl conservation differed from MinLoss approaches in terms of return on investment and which approach performed best in avoiding loss of waterfowl and broods separately. We also examined variation in results based upon the temporal scale of the abundance layers used for input and compared the region's current scheduling approach with results from our simulations. Our results suggested that MinLoss was the most efficient scheduling approach for both breeding waterfowl and broods and that using just breeding waterfowl to target areas for conservation programs might cause organizations to overlook important areas for broods, particularly over shorter timespans. The higher efficiency of MinLoss approaches in our simulations also indicated that incorporating probability of wetland drainage into decision-making improved the overall return on investment. We recommend that future conservation scheduling for easements in the region and for private land conservation in general include some form of return on investment or cost-effective analysis to make conservation more transparent