The National Workshop on Large Landscape Conservation

October 22 - 24, 2014

This proposed panel discusses the issues and challenges of evaluating conservation efforts engaged in landscape-scale natural resource protection, restoration, and management. Landscape conservation requires the consideration of ecological processes and threats that transcend protected area boundaries and are characterized by multiple land tenures and jurisdictions, heterogeneous land uses and land covers, and numerous stakeholders with diverse, and potentially conflicting agendas. Large landscape conservation efforts are underpinned by different collaborative arrangements between individuals or organizations that can lead to coordination of activities and the formation of common goals and objectives. Moreover, ecological studies increasingly work to integrate fine-scaled mechanisms with broad-scale patterns and processes; an informed understanding of the governing dimensions of these systems will be needed. Research, policy, and/or management that measure the performance of network governance in terms of both social and ecological dimensions is limited.

 For this panel, we propose to bring together academic researchers, agency leadership, and on-the-ground practitioners to present and discuss different pathways to evaluating large landscape conservation initiatives.