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Although large tracts of public land have been set aside for conservation in the western United States, landscape-scale threats such as climate change and fragmentation of adjacent private lands jeopardize the effectiveness of this network of protected areas. Undeveloped private lands can augment and buffer protected areas, and support landscape connectivity but their sub-division and development at the margins of protected areas further isolates and threatens these areas. Over the past three decades conservation easements (CEs) have emerged as a popular tool for protecting private lands, and as a possible market-based solution to the threat of landscape fragmentation, but as a markets-based mechanism there is no explicit expectation that land protected provides buffer and connectivity values.� Within the Madrean Archipelago ecoregion in southern Arizona and New Mexico, of which is 41.5% publically held, more than 137,783 hectares, constituting almost 10% of all private land in the area is protected through CEs. Through a spatial analysis we determined the extent to which CE distribution is preferred near protected area boundaries, and aligned to connect protected areas across the ecoregion. Specifically, we determined the distance of all conservation easements to nearest protected area, the percentage of CE land within various buffer distances from protected areas, and their spatial association to grasslands measured by the percentage of land contained within grasslands, and compared those statistics to those of all private lands across the ecoregion. Results show that CEs are selectively positioned closer to protected areas, and have a strong affinity to grassland conservation areas.� These results, coupled with preliminary interviews, suggest that the market-based CE model can contribute to achieving non-market, landscape-scale conversation goals because either �buyers� (organizations that seek, hold and finance CEs) or �sellers� (private landowners), or both parties, see value in strategically expanding the protection �footprint� beyond public protected areas.