The Conservation Biologist’s Toolbox for Planners

Abstract

Conservation biologists are concerned with maintaining the natural world including the diversity of genes, populations, species, communities, and ecosystems, and the ecological processes that sustain them. They have devoted substantial efforts to the development of scientifically-based, systematic methods for establishing conservation priorities. As a result, the conservation biology literature is now rich with papers that detail these methods and propose priority areas for conservation action at scales ranging from landscapes to the globe. Much less attention has been devoted to the development and implementation of methods for achieving on-the-ground conservation results or in measuring the effectiveness of conservation actions, although such methods are being advanced. Within the conservation biology community, these two bodies of methodology are referred to as conservation planning. As such, they are potentially useful tools to land-use planners and landscape architects. At the same time, there remain significant barriers related to scale of action, differences in planning methods, and mandates for planning between the conservation biology and landscape / land-use planning disciplines that must be overcome in order to better integrate the conservation practices of both schools. This paper discusses advances in planning methods that should prove useful to planners from both the conservation biology and landscape architecture/land-use planning communities, identifies barriers between disciplines, and discusses approaches that facilitate integration across these planning disciplines.