Prioritizing land conservation based on willingness to sell

When it comes to protecting land by purchasing the property or the underlying development rights, there has been a growing push to create systematic approaches to prioritize efforts. These prioritization schemes have generally relied on identifying the properties that have the greatest conservation values.

However, planning efforts have also been giving increasing attention to non-biological considerations such as acquisition costs and the risk of land conversion.

A new study in the journal Conservation Letters further contributes to these approaches by integrating another important social variable - the willingness of landowners to sell their property.

Angela Guerrero from the University of Queensland and fellow researchers conducted surveys of landowners within the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa and gauged their willingness to sell their land for conservation.

They then used modeling based on landowner surveys and census data to identify the combination of characteristics that best predicted which landowners would be willing to sell.

Important indicators of a landowner's willingness includes the length of time they owned the property, the length of time their family owned the property, how long they had been farming, their conservation knowledge and behavior, and their membership in specific organizations. 

The researchers also compared the hypothetical outcomes from a planning approach for the region that relied strictly on meeting conservation targets at a minimum cost versus a similar approach that also incorporated the modeling on willingness to sell.

"Using predictions of land managers' willingness-to-sell, we identified solutions compromising planning units that were on average 1.4 - 1.6 times more likely to be available for acquisition," the authors write.

This finding demonstrates a likely benefit from considering willingness-to-sell in conservation planning - reduced time spent pursuing conservation targets that are unlikely to pan out.

The researchers' approach reflects the "conceptual shift from assessing conservation priority to conservation opportunity." 

However certain potential pitfalls may emerge from using this approach. It likely will be time consuming and somewhat costly to identify the factors that influence landowner willingness-to-sell in different regional settings.

Furthermore, errors in the modeling in a given area could lead to worse outcomes if owners of high-conservation value land were incorrectly considered unlikely to sell.

Nevertheless, as one of the first studies to consider willingness-to-sell as a variable for prioritization of land protection, this research makes an important contribution to conservation planning.

--by Rob Goldstein

Guerrero, A., Knight, A., Grantham, H., Cowling, R., & Wilson, K. (2010). Predicting willingness-to-sell and its utility for assessing conservation opportunity for expanding protected area networks Conservation Letters DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2010.00116.x