Landowner Perceptions of Payments for Nature Conservation on Private Land.

Private land conservation (PLC) programs often provide financial incentives to motivate and enable landowners to engage in conservation. However, few studies have explored the psychological and management impacts of these incentives. We interviewed 50 landowners in Tasmania, Australia who were engaged in incentivised or nonincentivised PLC programs. Landowners who received incentives were paid to either protect private land through creating a conservation covenant (a legal deed restricting land uses) or engage in a specific stewardship activity (e.g., planting trees). Most landowners who received payments to create covenants stated that they would not have done so without the payment. However, landowners, including those who have purchased or inherited covenanted properties, also indicated that neither these payments, nor the conservation covenant made any significant impact on how they managed the land. Covenant incentives did not improve attitudes towards conservation or conservationists. In contrast, most landowners receiving stewardship payments reported that these payments enabled the conservation actions they valued, helped build relationships and promoted favorable attitudes towards conservation. Contextual factors that influenced the impact of financial incentives on conservation action included the quality of relationship between landowners and stewardship officers, availability of private funds for conservation, and multigenerational aspirations. Our research identifies some of the intended and unintended impacts of financial incentives and describes how a fuller understanding of the motivations, identities, and aspirations of landowners may lead to the design of more socially resilient and ecologically effective PLC programs.

Noah's Ark conservation will not preserve threatened ecological communities under climate change.

BACKGROUND: Effective conservation of threatened ecological communities requires knowledge of where climatically suitable habitat is likely to persist into the future. We use the critically endangered Lowland Grassland community of Tasmania, Australia as a case study to identify options for management in cases where future climatic conditions become unsuitable for the current threatened community. METHODS: We model current and future climatic suitability for the Lowland Themeda and the Lowland Poa Grassland communities, which make up the listed ecological community. We also model climatic suitability for the structurally dominant grass species of these communities, and for closely related grassland and woodland communities. We use a dynamically downscaled regional climate model derived from six CMIP3 global climate models, under the A2 SRES emissions scenario. RESULTS: All model projections showed a large reduction in climatically suitable area by mid-century. Outcomes are slightly better if closely related grassy communities are considered, but the extent of suitable area is still substantially reduced. Only small areas within the current distribution are projected to remain climatically suitable by the end of the century, and very little of that area is currently in good condition. CONCLUSIONS: As the climate becomes less suitable, a gradual change in the species composition, structure and habitat quality of the grassland communities is likely. Conservation management will need to focus on maintaining diversity, structure and function, rather than attempting to preserve current species composition. Options for achieving this include managing related grassland types to maintain grassland species at the landscape-scale, and maximising the resilience of grasslands by reducing further fragmentation, weed invasion and stress from other land uses, while accepting that change is inevitable. Attempting to maintain the status quo by conserving the current structure and composition of Lowland Grassland communities is unlikely to be a viable management option in the long term.