The South Mountain Partnership – Exploring the Process of Implementing Collaborative Landscape-Scale Conservation

The South Mountain landscape, spanning four counties in south-central Pennsylvania, offers a unique convergence of natural, cultural/historic, agricultural, and recreational resources. The South Mountain Partnership, as one of Pennsylvania’s Conservation Landscapes, is implementing an explicitly landscape-scale approach to the conservation of this important landscape. Under the direction of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC), in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, a broad coalition of citizens, non-profits, businesses, academic institutions, and local and state government agencies are building a collective conversation about this landscape’s future – and working to translate this conversation into action on the ground.

This presentation will introduce insights and lessons learned that ATC has drawn over the last six years of directing the South Mountain Partnership. In particular, we will explore three themes that have emerged from the Partnership’s work as critical to initiating and sustaining landscape conservation:

• A collaborative process: a critical implication of landscape-scale work is the need to build collaborations – across geography and disciplines. We will highlight the collaborative process as the foundation of the Partnership.

• A cohesive conceptual framework: landscape-scale work can be a somewhat nebulous concept and articulating a concrete understanding of how the work will be approached can be critical to building the collaboration. We will highlight how the Partnership’s strong strategic foundation guides our work.

• Identification of a network leader: we will highlight how having a person with dedicated time to convene, facilitate and ensure follow-through on the collaborative work has enabled the successes of the Partnership.