Doctoral Dissertation Research: Landscape and Livelihood Effects of Lands Trusts

有效的景观尺度保护战略仍然是世界范围内的优先事项。随着美洲各国政府发现仅靠大型干预公园项目是不够的，新的公私合作保护战略在景观规模保护的新兴愿景中扮演着越来越重要的角色。在这些合作策略中，土地信托是非营利组织建立的，旨在促进和管理私人、个人土地所有者自愿的长期承诺，以保护他们的土地，用于保护、娱乐或其他公共利益目的。这个博士论文研究项目将探讨土地信托和保护地役权作为公共-私人工具在艾迪森县和佛蒙特州东北部王国的不同环境和人类生计的景观级保护的可行性。这两个深入的案例研究集中在两组地役权上，这两组地役权分别为农业和森林基质，在工作景观中为社区和保护服务。本研究主要关注两个相互关联的问题：(1)土地信托的总体活动是否具有景观变化的中介作用？(2)土地信托能否作为公地发挥作用，使私有财产能够广泛获得各种资源？遥感景观尺度数据的区域评价将以基于深度地点评价的解释为基础。地理信息系统衍生的景观级分析将与访谈和焦点小组数据联系起来，部分方法是通过受访者的属性建立横断面。该博士生希望证明，在景观尺度上，地役权活动增加了连通性、斑块大小和栖息地多样性，并减少了土地利用和覆盖类别的转换频率。在两个农村社区的工作环境中，研究结果将描述获得保护信托基金持有的土地的性别、分类和时间模式。学生希望展示保护地役权所提供的法律结构如何以不同的方式促进或限制参与，从而对土地信托作为有效保护代理人的潜力产生不利影响。该研究还可能描述信托公司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且确实从信托土地中受益，以及这些私人保留的土地是否符合或扩展了共同财产的理论界限。这项研究应有助于理解发达国家文化和政治生态学中适应性因素的资源获取战略，并有助于土地变化科学中关于制度作用的新兴文献。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。研究结果还将指出切实可行的方法，使地役权这一有吸引力的现有工具能够更好地为科学工作提供服务，促进一种景观规模的保护，通过解决生计、生态和美学问题，得到当地居民的支持和参与。作为博士论文研究进步奖，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研究生涯。

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.