Conservation planning 37usually can be altered by government, war, or other action. Effectively guarding
and managing the resource is usually essential, and may be in combination
with, or an alternative to, legal constraints.
Conservation by The Nature Conservancy
Conservation planning by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the largest
private landholder in the world, is highly developed and warrants brief descrip-
tion, particularly because of its use of regions. Ecoregions (Chapter1)havebeen
mapped worldwide by various sources (Groveset al.2002,Anderson 2003, Mag-
nusson2004). They are the somewhat distinctive groupings of natural commu-
nities, plants, and animals over extensive land areas, and differ dramatically
from society’s hierarchy of familiar administrative units with mapped political
boundaries. The mission of TNC is the long-term protection of all plant and ani-
mal species and the habitats needed to support them. Ecoregional conservation
identifies and prioritizes a ‘‘portfolio” of conservation areas that should collec-
tively conserve the biodiversity of each region delimited. A portfolio encompasses
multiple examples of all native species and natural communities in sufficient
number, distribution, and quality to hopefully support their existence long term.
Conservation planning then moves to the land protection phase, both by TNC
and with ‘‘partner” agencies and organizations, to protect the lands identified.
Terrestrial ecosystems are addressed at three spatial scales. ‘‘Matrix-forming”
areas, such as extensive forest or rangeland, are at the scale of thousands to mil-
lions of hectares. Large patches are more delimited areas, some 2000 to 20 000 ha
(5000 to 50 000 acres), with relatively distinct environmental conditions. Small
patches are small sites with rare species dependent on unusual environmental
conditions present. Combinations of these three scale types comprise a portfolio
to protect the biodiversity of an ecoregion.
Land protection planning for a particular project, of course, is complex and
somewhat project-specific. How well a site fits with the organization’s mission
and with the determined ecoregion portfolio goal is important. Cost, balanced
against available and expected financial resources, is important. Threat to the
resource and urgency for protection are important. Finally availability of the
land for protection is important. Increasingly, broad-scale issues such as urban-
ization rate, a dropping water table, climate change, highway traffic impact,
roadlessness, and invasive species spread, are being considered in the planning.
This TNC conservation planning and action approach has produced impres-
sive results in North America and elsewhere. Still some major biodiversity issues
have been little addressed with this approach. Marine ecosystems are essen-
tially absent. Stream and river systems, together with their migratory fish,
formconnected linear networks that cut across these hierarchical area-focused