Conservation planning 35wildlife conservation commonly involves land protection and management, plus
enhancing populations for hunters and for the long term. River conservation,
aparticularly challenging issue in urban regions, typically involves riparian-
zone and surrounding-land inputs, natural-flooding regimes, fish migration,
and simply concrete in the floodplain and river, which forms dams, roadways,
bridges, and diverse encroaching structures. Rangeland conservation empha-
sizes livestock effects, such as overgrazing, soil erosion, riverbank and river
degradation, and obliteration of natural communities around wet spots. Water
resources or aquatic-system conservation involves maintaining habitat diver-
sity (especially bottom characteristics), waterside zones, fish, hydrology, physi-
cal/chemical/biological water-quality attributes, and outside impacts from log-
ging, agriculture, livestock, and built areas. Conservation targeted to specific
habitat types, such as acid bogs, salt marshes, rainforest, and streams, or to
specific species, such as waterbirds, desert plants, and big fish, is common.
Natureconservationincludes all of these and is the optimum and prime tar-
getofconservation. Also, in contrast to, e.g., game or biodiversity or rangeland,
almost everyone relates to and supports the idea of conserving nature. As noted
in Chapter1,natural systems are effectively nature, with the advantage of focus-
ing on nature’s structural, functional, and change attributes. These attributes
link tightly with conservation planning.
Aconservationist may find the city or metropolitan area to be hopelessly
complex and full of unpredictable people. Ironically, the urbanist may note the
hopeless complexity of conservation, focused on so many critical resources and
objectives of society spread over such a vast surface of the Earth. The urban
planner is quite comfortable with preservation of historic buildings, heritage
sites, and even cultural landscapes as a subfield in its own right (Green and
Vos2001). Yet most of the issues in cultural site preservation are quite similar
or analogous to those in many of the conservation subfields. Land is protected,
an internal resource managed, outside impacts minimized, portions undergo
restoration, and costs are high.
Land protection
Four perspectives are particularly valuable in understanding land
protection: (1) organizations and results; (2) conservation by The Nature Conser-
vancy; (3) large green patches and corridors; and (4) the metapopulation concept.
Two types of land are the highest priorities for conservation protection: remote
and large.
Organizations and results
Who protects land? Local units such as towns and counties normally
protect small parcels. Even individuals may protect small parcels for a period.