Doctoral Dissertation Research: Landscape and Livelihood Effects of Lands Trusts

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Strategies for effective landscape-scale conservation remain a priority worldwide. As governments throughout the Americas have found large interventionist park projects alone to be insufficient, new public-private partnership strategies for conservation have assumed an increasingly important role in an emerging vision of landscape-scale conservation. Among these partnership strategies are land trusts that non-profit organizations have established to facilitate and administer the voluntary, long-term commitments of private, individual landowners to protect their holdings for conservation, recreation, or other publicly beneficial purposes. This doctoral dissertation research project will explore the viability of land trusts and conservation easements as public-private instruments for landscape-level protection of diverse environments and human livelihoods in Addison County and in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The two in-depth case studies focus on two sets of easements explicitly engineered to serve both communities and conservation in a working landscape given, respectively, an agricultural and forest matrix. This study focuses on two interrelated questions: (1) Does the aggregate activity of land trusts function as a landscape change agent? (2) Can land trusts function as a commons, enabling broad access to a variety of resources on private property? Regional assessment of remotely sensed landscape-scale data will be grounded through explanation derived from in-depth place-based assessment. GIS-derived landscape-level analyses will be linked to interview and focus group data, in part by establishing transects through respondents' properties. The doctoral student expects to show that easement activity increases connectivity, patch size, and habitat diversity, and decreases land use and cover class transition frequencies at the landscape scale. Within the working landscape of two rural communities, the study findings will delineate the gendered, classed, and temporal patterns of access to lands held in conservation trusts. The student expects to demonstrate how the legal structures provided by conservation easements enable or limit participation differentially, thus adversely affecting the potential of land trusts as effective agents of conservation. The study also may characterize a potential user community that trusts have failed to engage. At a regional scale, this research project investigates whether the public can and does benefit from land in trust, and whether these privately conserved lands fit or extend the theoretical limits of common property. The study should contribute to understandings of resource access strategies for developed-world adaptive agents in cultural and political ecology, and to the emerging literature in land-change science on the role of institutions. More broadly, results from this investigation will contribute to theories of conservation, integrated land-change science, and common property. The regional assessment will help identify potential controlling agents of future landscapes. Study outcomes will also pinpoint practical ways that easements, an attractive existing tool, can better serve scientific efforts to promote a type of landscape-scale conservation that commands the support and engagement of residents in place, by addressing livelihood as well as ecological and aesthetic concerns. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.