Strategic Conservation Planning

Industries that drive economic growth and support our comfortable modern lifestyles have exploited natural resources to do so. But now there's growing understanding that business can benefit from a better relationship with the environment. Leading corporations have begun to leverage nature-based remediation, restoration, and enhanced lands management to meet a variety of business needs, such as increasing employee engagement and establishing key performance indicators for reporting and disclosures. Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning offers fresh insights for corporations and environmental groups looking to create mutually beneficial partnerships that use conservation action to address business challenges and realize meaningful environmental outcomes. Recognizing the long history of mistrust between corporate action and environmental effort, Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning begins by explaining how to identify priorities that will yield a beneficial relationship between a company and nonprofit. Next, O'Gorman offers steps for creating ecologically-focused projects that address key business needs. Chapters highlight existing projects with different scales of engagement, emphasizing that headline-generating, multimillion dollar commitments are not necessarily the most effective approach. Myriad case studies featuring programs from habitat restoration to environmental educational initiatives at companies like Bridgestone USA, General Motors, and CRH Americas are included to help spark new ideas. With limited government funding available for conservation and increasing competition for grant support, corporate efforts can fill a growing need for environmental stewardship while also providing business benefits. Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning presents a comprehensive approach for effective engagement between the public and private sector, encouraging pragmatic partnerships that benefit us all.

Make conservation investments using structured decision-making, mathematical programming, the power of markets, and behavioral nudges.

Billions have been spent on land conservation but too little attention had been paid to how cost-effective these investments have been. With budgets increasingly constrained, conservationists must learn to fully harness their funds to protect critical resources. Messer and Allen are pioneers in making conservation selection more successful, cost-effective, scientific, and transparent. This book introduces powerful mathematical tools available for project selection, using real-life examples and a practical step-by-step approach. Readers can readily apply these methods to their own work, accomplishing more with less by combining the individual benefits of structured decision-making, mathematical programming, and an understanding of market forces and human behavior. The authors highlight tools from conservation science, mathematics, land use planning and behavioral economics, showing how they can be combined to help protect key environmental resources. This is an invaluable volume for all students, professionals and stakeholders associated with conservation programs.

The authors draw on their extensive “hands-on” experience to provide an essential textbook for practitioners, students, or researchers of conservation, natural resource management, or landscape planning and architecture. This title provides the methods, tools, approaches, and case studies to plan a nature conservation project from inception to implementation and monitoring and evaluation. It draws on a wide range of disciplines and literature from conservation biology, landscape architecture, and land-use planning to decision science, natural resource economics, and sustainability. The book's primary audience is conservation scientists, planners, and practitioners in nongovernmental organizations; natural resource agency biologists and scientists; and professional landscape architects and land-use planners in both developed and developing nations throughout the world. With decades of experience as conservation planners, the authors have combined the fields of spatial planning (establishing priority places for conservation) and strategic planning into one overall planning approach. The book's underlying philosophy is that effective planning is really about making tough choices of where to allocate resources to achieve the conservation outcomes of a project, program, or conservation initiative.

A single-resource volume of information on the most current and effective techniques of wildlife modeling, Models for Planning Wildlife Conservation in Large Landscapes is appropriate for students and researchers alike. The unique blend of conceptual, methodological, and application chapters discusses research, applications and concepts of modeling and presents new ideas and strategies for wildlife habitat models used in conservation planning. The book makes important contributions to wildlife conservation of animals in several ways: (1) it highlights historical and contemporary advancements in the development of wildlife habitat models and their implementation in conservation planning; (2) it provides practical advice for the ecologist conducting such studies; and (3) it supplies directions for future research including new strategies for successful studies.Intended to provide a recipe for successful development of wildlife habitat models and their implementation in conservation planning, the book could be used in studying wildlife habitat models, conservation planning, and management techniques. Additionally it may be a supplemental text in courses dealing with quantitative assessment of wildlife populations. Additionally, the length of the book would be ideal for graduate student seminar course.Using wildlife habitat models in conservation planning is of considerable interest to wildlife biologists. With ever tightening budgets for wildlife research and planning activities, there is a growing need to use computer methods. Use of simulation models represents the single best alternative. However, it is imperative that these techniques be described in a single source. Moreover, biologists should be made aware of alternative modeling techniques. It is also important that practical guidance be provided to biologists along with a demonstration of utility of these procedures. Currently there is little guidance in the wildlife or natural resource planning literature on how best to incorporate wildlife planning activities, particularly community-based approaches. Now is the perfect time for a synthestic publication that clearly outlines the concepts and available methods, and illustrates them. Only single resource book of information not only on various wildlife modeling techniques, but also with practical guidance on the demonstrated utility of each based on real-world conditions. Provides concepts, methods and applications for wildlife ecologists and others within a GIS context. Written by a team of subject-area experts

Systematic Conservation Planning provides a clear, comprehensive guide to the process of deriving a conservation area network for regions, which will best represent the biodiversity of regions in the most cost-effective way. The measurement of biodiversity, design of field sampling strategies, alongside different data treatment methods are detailed helping to provide a conceptual framework for identifying conservation area networks, underpinned by the concept of complementarity. Setting conservation targets and then multi-criteria analyses, using complementarity but bringing in other criteria reflecting competing uses of land or water, to show how conservation area networks can achieve conservation targets in ways that also allow for the production of food, fiber and shelter are also discussed. Providing a clear procedure for identifying conservation priority areas underpinned by cutting edge science, this book will be of interest to graduate students, academics, planners and decision makers dealing with natural resource use and exploitation, alongside conservation NGOs.