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One challenge central to many large landscape conservation efforts is managing land use change in the form of urban sprawl and other forms of land development. This is especially the case for landscape conservation programs that are located near large urban centers or communities viewed as having high amenity values. Between 1982 and 2007, approximately 350,000 acres of rangelands were lost to development each year in the western United States (Charnley et al. 2014). Managing land use change is especially important when conservation efforts are focused on working landscapes. Working landscapes depend on several characteristics to maintain both natural resources-based economies and conserve natural resources for the benefit of wildlife, people, and ecosystems. Specific challenges include:

• Landscape Fragmentation: Ranching is an extensive land use – it requires large open areas to graze livestock. This is especially true in arid and semi-arid regions where forage resources are water limited. Ranches are most efficient when the lands they use for livestock grazing are contiguous, allowing easy management of livestock across pastures. As urban development spreads into rural areas, the landscape is broken into smaller and smaller pieces. This process can limit the amount land available for grazing and make moving livestock across the landscape more difficult. Fragmentation also harms wildlife habitat by destroying habitat, splitting up the landscape, and disrupting migratory corridors.

New landowners have different goals than agricultural producers, valuing amenity ownership over working landscapes. This can result in conflicts on how a landscape should be managed. Pets can harm wildlife populations and gardens can bring invasive plants.

• Loss of agricultural infrastructure:  Farmers and ranchers in working landscapes are economically co-dependent. Ranchers need access to supplemental feed, auction barns, equipment and ranch infrastructure goods like fencing and well pumps. As the number of ranchers in an area decreases, the viability of businesses that provide these goods and services may decline. This can increase costs and decrease competitiveness of agricultural producers.

Some large landscape conservation efforts focus on preventing these impacts by working to implement land use plans that prioritize conservation of working landscapes; encourage the use of tools like conservation easements, which protect ranchland from development while providing an economic return to the rancher; and support collective action to strengthen the agricultural economy and increase the economic security of producers.

What do we mean when we use the term “landscape”? Everyone agrees that a landscape is a large area, but how do we know the difference between a landscape and a region or a watershed? And does this difference even matter? In the case of large landscape conservation and related collaborative approaches to conservation, there is no one set standard for the area of land addressed. Rather, what is implied by landscape is that the entirety of a cohesive, connected land unit is included and addressed by the conservation program. In some cases, a landscape can be relatively small, like a single small watershed. In other cases, a landscape may be very large, like an entire section of a US state or an entire mountain range.  Generally, when we refer to large landscape conservation, we are thinking about the second group of efforts – programs that focus on achieving common conservation goals over a land area that may be tens of thousands to millions of hectares. A relatively small large landscape conservation group is the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance (website) in the US state of Arizona. This organization focuses on a 250,000-hectare landscape. In contrast, the collection of efforts to conservation sage brush habitat in the Great Basin region of the US focuses on a 70-million-hectare landscape. Because of the size of the sage brush conservation effort, it is broken into separate large landscape conservation plans in each of the 10 US states involved in the conservation effort.

Working landscapes are a related concept. The “landscape” part of working landscapes has the same meaning – a cohesive, ecologically and socially connected area of land. The “working” part tells us something about the land use and economic importance of a landscape. When we talk about working landscapes we are talking about the areas between cities or towns and natural areas with limited continuous use by people. Rural areas, which often are dominated by intensive or extensive agricultural, forestry, or other natural resources based economies, are generally a part of a working landscape. A working landscape then, is a cohesive unit of land that is ecologically, socially, and economically connected.

An understanding of the working landscape in a region can provide an organizing logic for a large landscape conservation program. Large landscape conservation is focused on cohesive, connected land units. Often, the existence of a community of agricultural producers around a place or region helps provide the economic and social cohesion for a collaborative approach to conservation. These community and economic connections between people in many cases will also align well with logical ecological boundaries between landscapes. For example, the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance is focused on a single valley bordered on three sides by mountains and on one side by an urban area. The mountains provide both the ecological boundary of the landscape as well as a social boundary that makes people in the Altar Valley feel connected to the place. The agricultural producers in the valley are all ranchers, providing an economic connection. The ranchers in the valley are all concerned with maintaining an ecologically healthy landscape in part because this is what allows them to be successful economically. Encroachment of development from the nearby urban area threatens the agricultural economy by reducing the number of producers. Urban encroachment also threatens the ecological health of the landscape as it becomes more fragmented by development and the social cohesion of the landscape as ranchers sell their land and move away.