Doctoral Dissertation Research: Landscape and Livelihood Effects of Lands Trusts

博士论文研究：土地信托的景观和生计影响

• 批准号: 0425801
• 负责人: B. Turner
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: Clark University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-09-01 至 2006-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0425801&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Landscape; Livelihood

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.

有效的大规模保护战略仍然是全世界的优先事项。 由于美洲各国政府发现，仅靠大型干预性公园项目是不够的，新的公私合作保护战略在新兴的大规模保护愿景中发挥着越来越重要的作用。 这些伙伴关系战略包括非营利组织建立的土地信托，以促进和管理私人和个人土地所有者的自愿、长期承诺，为养护、娱乐或其他公益目的保护其土地。 本博士论文研究项目将探讨土地信托和保护地役权的可行性，作为公共-私人工具，用于在艾迪生县和佛蒙特州东北王国保护不同的环境和人类生计。 这两个深入的案例研究侧重于两套地役权明确设计，以服务于社区和保护工作的景观，分别考虑到农业和森林矩阵。 本研究聚焦于两个相关的问题：（1）土地信托的总体活动是否具有景观变化的作用？ (2)土地信托能否发挥公地的作用，使人们能够广泛获得私有财产上的各种资源？ 将通过从深入的基于地点的评估中得出的解释，对遥感的大尺度数据进行区域评估。 将把地理信息系统衍生的调查一级的分析与访谈和重点小组数据联系起来，部分办法是通过调查对象的财产建立横断面。 该博士生希望证明地役权活动增加了连通性，斑块大小和栖息地多样性，并降低了土地利用和覆盖类在景观尺度上的转换频率。 在两个农村社区的工作景观，研究结果将描绘的性别，分类和时间模式的保护信托持有的土地。 学生希望展示如何保护地役权提供的法律的结构，使或限制参与差异，从而对土地信托作为保护的有效代理人的潜力产生不利影响。 该研究还可以描述信任未能参与的潜在用户社区。在区域范围内，本研究项目调查公众是否能够并确实受益于信托土地，以及这些私人保护的土地是否符合或扩展了共同财产的理论限制。 这项研究应有助于了解发达国家的适应剂在文化和政治生态的资源获取策略，并在土地变化科学的作用机构的新兴文献。更广泛地说，这项调查的结果将有助于保护理论，综合土地变化科学和共同财产。 区域评估将有助于确定未来景观的潜在控制因素。 研究结果还将指出地役权，一个有吸引力的现有工具，可以更好地为科学工作服务的实际方法，以促进一种大规模的保护，命令当地居民的支持和参与，通过解决生计以及生态和美学问题。 作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立的研究生涯。