Land Use & Open Space Conservation

“It’s a way to achieve conservation in the context of development that is going to happen anyway,” says Sarah Reed, a conservation biologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society and affiliate faculty member at Colorado State University studying conservation developments. Conservation developments already account for a quarter of the private land set aside in the U.S. As their popularity grows, ecologists and conservation biologists like Reed are working to identify how to design, regulate and manage them to make them most helpful for biodiversity.

State Forestry is regarded by political ecologists as a coercive tool deployed by state authorities to nationalize, control and order the forest as a resource within the territory of a nation. The consequence of this is civilizing local people and subjecting them to the grip of the state. Much of this literature comes from the global South.

Editor's Note: The Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation helped fund Sarah's early work on Conservation Development with the Wildlife Conservation Society through a Leadership Grant.

Different patterns of urban development may have widely varying long-term effects on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To investigate such effects, we used UPlan geographic information system–based software to model three 2050 urban-growth scenarios for Yolo County, a predominantly agricultural area near Sacramento, Califor- nia. Two scenarios correspond to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s A2 and B1 storylines.

On December 11, 2013, we released the report Changes to the Land: Four Scenarios for the Future of the Massachusetts Landscape (link will download report) to an overwhelmingly positive response.