Cutting the trees to save the forest: The Finch Pruyn working forest

The past two decades have seen sales of millions of acres of commercial forest land in the United States. Changed ownership often results in altered forest management, parcelization or development. Such changes have profound implications for forest species and ecosystems, as well as the timber industry, recreational opportunities, and local and regional economies. An emerging strategy seeks to protect lands through complex public-private partnerships involving state agencies, conservation organizations, and commercial investors. By definition, these partnerships have both environmental and socioeconomic goals; as such, they represent contemporary experiments in sustainable development applied to forested landscapes. As this approach is a recent innovation, its benefits for nature and people have yet to be demonstrated, and the general applicability of this integrated approach to conservation is unknown. Our objective is to identify context-specific objectives and indicators to support integrated monitoring and adaptive management for the former Finch Pruyn lands, which encompass 161,000 acres in the Adirondack region of New York State. This interdisciplinary project involves social science faculty and students from Cornell University and cooperation from conservation scientists from The Nature Conservancy. Through a review of the literature on criteria and indicators for sustainable forestry, we developed an analytical framework for measuring ecological, social, and economic implications of forest management practices. Through key informant interviews, we identified context-specific objectives and indicators for the Finch Pruyn lands, including forest health, species protection, expanded recreation opportunities and community economic vitality. Our approach allows us to compare existing commitments to collection of monitoring data to ideal data sets as defined by actors occupying various structural positions. Identification of potential gaps in monitoring represents an opportunity for dialogue, reallocation of resources and enrollment of new strategic partners. Over time, these global and local indicators can support an adaptive framework through which flows of information inform management in an iterative process. Preliminary results indicate that this project entails several innovations that may contribute to its success, including the development of a comprehensive ecological baseline and the explicit engagement of local claims to livelihoods and access. We make several recommendations for future working forest agreements, such as the need to define clear environmental and socioeconomic goals at the outset, and, when private philanthropy is central to project viability, the incorporation of monitoring costs into initial fundraising targets. We believe these lessons are applicable to conservation development projects in the Northern Forest region and beyond

Trends in protected area representation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in five tropical countries

In late 2020, governments will set the next decade of conservation targets under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Setting new targets requires understanding how well national protected area (PA) networks are spatially representing important areas for biodiversity and ecosystem services. We analyzed the representation of biodiversity priority areas (BPAs), forests, forest carbon stocks, non-timber forest products (NTFPs), and freshwater ecosystem services (FES) within terrestrial PA systems in Cambodia, Guyana, Liberia, Madagascar, and Suriname in 2003 and 2017. Four of the countries (all except Suriname) expanded their terrestrial PA networks during the study period. In all five countries, we found that PAs represented BPAs, forests, and forest carbon stocks relatively well, based on their size. PAs did not represent NTFPs and FES particularly well, except in Cambodia where FES were well represented. Countries that expanded PA networks during the study period also increased representation of forests, BPAs, and ES; in Cambodia and Madagascar these increases were substantial. Representation could be improved across all five countries, however, indicating that additional efforts are needed to safeguard biodiversity and ecosystem benefits to people in these countries

Forest At Work: Conservation And Sustainable Management Of The Former Finch Pruyn Lands

Major selloffs of industrial timberlands in the U.S. in the past two decades have prompted environmental concerns about fragmentation and conversion of forest lands, as well as social and economic concerns about the loss of traditional livelihoods in forestry and rural community decline. In an effort to maintain intact forests and the many ecological and socioeconomic values they provide, conservation organizations, public agencies, and local communities are investing in complex "working forest" land deals in which land and property rights are divided among multiple actors. These transactions represent large, expensive, and relatively untested experiments in integrating conservation, sustainable forest management, and economic development. As such, there is a need for critical assessment in order to evaluate outcomes, manage adaptively, and inform the design of future transactions. We reviewed existing definitions of sustainable forest management, as well as case studies of working forests, to evaluate how ecological and socioeconomic indicators are incorporated in forest management and policy. We also undertook an in-depth case study of a working forest transaction involving the former Finch Pruyn lands in New York State, to explore how this particular arrangement integrates international, regional, and local sustainability goals. We found that our current ability to learn from past experience with working forests is severely limited by a lack of integrated, iterative monitoring data. Monitoring programs tend to be short-term and stymied by small budgets, high staff turnover, and the complexity of the underlying socio-ecological systems. We also found that management objectives for the Finch Pruyn working forest reflect ecological criteria that are consistent with international standards for sustainable forest management, as well as many of the goals described by regional and local actors, such as providing new public recreation opportunities and maintaining some level of forest- related employment. Specific goals related to supporting local economic development were less well reflected in management objectives. Such goals, however, are arguably beyond the scope of a single land deal. In general, we found that working forest transactions have the potential to achieve multiple conservation and sustainability goals, as well as helping to reconcile long-held disputes over forest land management. However, our current ability to assess outcomes is limited by the relatively recent emergence of this strategy and a lack of empirical evidence, particularly related to socioeconomic outcomes. The lack of evidence could exacerbate existing disputes about the relationship between forest land use, ecological integrity, and socioeconomic well-being. Given the inherent complexity of the issues surrounding working forests, we recommend integrated ecological and socioeconomic monitoring to support adaptive management and to build on existing networks between conservation groups, environmental agencies, forest landowners, and local communities. By bringing critical attention to these large, complex experiments in forest conservation and sustainable management, we hope to inform efforts to simultaneously protect ecological integrity and meet the needs of current and future generations

The effect of a political crisis on performance of community forests and protected areas in Madagascar

Abstract Understanding the effectiveness of conservation interventions during times of political instability is important given how much of the world’s biodiversity is concentrated in politically fragile nations. Here, we investigate the effect of a political crisis on the relative performance of community managed forests versus protected areas in terms of reducing deforestation in Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot. We use remotely sensed data and statistical matching within an event study design to isolate the effect of the crisis and post-crisis period on performance. Annual rates of deforestation accelerated at the end of the crisis and were higher in community forests than in protected areas. After controlling for differences in location and other confounding variables, we find no difference in performance during the crisis, but community-managed forests performed worse in post-crisis years. These findings suggest that, as a political crisis subsides and deforestation pressures intensify, community-based conservation may be less resilient than state protection

Mapping potential freshwater services, and their representation within Protected Areas (PAs), under conditions of sparse data. Pilot implementation for Cambodia

Freshwater is arguably one of Earth’s most threatened natural resources, on which more than 7 billion people depend. Pressures on freshwater resources from infrastructure, resource development, agricultural pollution and deforestation are mounting, particularly in developing countries. To date, conservation responses such as Protected Areas (PAs) have not typically targeted freshwater ecosystems and their services, and thus little is known about the effectiveness of these efforts in protecting them. This paper proposes and pilots an innovative freshwater services metrics framework to quantify the representation of potential freshwater services in PAs under conditions of scarce data, with a pilot application for Cambodia. Our results indicate that conservation actions have more effectively represented potential freshwater regulation services than potential freshwater provisioning services, with major rivers remaining generally unprotected. Results from the framework are then used to propose a series of context and region specific management options to improve the conservation of freshwater services in Cambodia. There is an acute need for such management options, as the country’s food security depends largely on important freshwater ecosystems such as the Tonle Sap Lake and the deep water pools systems of the Mekong River. The framework proposed can be applied in other countries or large river basins to explore the degree of representation of freshwater services within PAs systems, under conditions of sparse data

Ecosystem service coproduction across the zones of biosphere reserves in Europe

Biosphere reserves (BR) balance biodiversity protection and sustainable use through different management restrictions in three zones: core areas, buffer zones, and transition areas. Information about the links between zoning and ecosystem services (ES) is lacking, particularly in terms of the relative roles of natural contributions (ecosystem properties and functions) and anthropogenic contributions (human inputs such as technology and infrastructure) in coproducing ES. This study aimed to: (1) analyse how coproduction of four ES (crop production, grazing, timber production, recreation) differs across the three zones of BRs; and (2) understand which predictors (zoning, natural and anthropogenic contributions, other environmental characteristics) best explain ES provision within BRs. To do this, we collected spatial data on 137 terrestrial BRs in the European Union and on 16 indicators of ES coproduction. We used non-parametric pairwise Wilcoxon rank sum tests to calculate differences in indicators between zones. We used model selection and multiple linear regression to identify predictors of ES provision patterns. Anthropogenic contributions showed most differences between zones, with contributions generally increasing from buffer zones to transition areas. Natural contributions did not, on average, differ between zones, however, for recreation and crop production they decreased from buffer zones to transition areas. ES provision differed between zones only for crop production and grazing, which increased from buffer zones to transition areas. Regression analysis showed that natural contributions are the best predictors of ES provision for all four services. Our results indicate that zoning of BRs has implications for ES coproduction