BLM's National Conservation Lands: Protecting Large Landscapes

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages over 245 million surface acres, mostly spread across the western United States. About 12% of this land base, or about 30 million acres, is managed as part of the National Landscape Conservation System, also known as the National Conservation Lands. The National Conservation Lands are America's newest conservation system, legislatively established in 2009 in order to conserve, protect, and restore nationally significant landscapes that have outstanding cultural, ecological, and scientific values for the benefit of current and future generations. The National Conservation Lands are a 21st century conservation system where diverse land uses are managed with a conservation context. This poster presents three main avenues in which the BLM is managing the National Conservation Lands as and within landscapes. First, many units of the National Conservation Lands are large, conserved landscapes on their own, for example, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument covers nearly 1.9 million acres. Second, the BLM is beginning to manage the units of the National Conservation Lands as integral parts of the larger landscape, for example, by using landscape-scale data to identify regional restoration priorities. Finally, several units of the National Conservation Lands are near to metropolitan areas, providing access to large landscapes to urban dwellers, which helps to engage a new sector of the population in large landscape conservation. As the BLM continues to embrace the landscape approach to land management, the National Conservation Lands serve as an exemplar of large landscape conservation.