University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Background/Question/Methods
Biodiversity worldwide declines at an alarming rate and conservation organizations struggle to find the resources needed to face those threats. Accounting for bottom-up sources of support for conservation, as a form of cost-sharing or cost reduction for conservation is the focus of the growing field of opportunity in conservation science. Examples of such support include philanthropic giving to conservation organizations, local ballot initiatives to protect land, and volunteer effort applied to management activities on protected sites. Spatial variation in support for conservation can then be integrated into conservation planning. Understanding people's willingness to pay, sell, enroll, or act for conservation enable conservation actors to identify areas of opportunity, where prospects of cost-sharing arrangements are more likely to materialize. The integration of human and social capital into the conservation planning process could lead to more rapid and cost-effective gains for conservation.
Results/Conclusions
Here, we identify another form of this support. From a dataset of ~4,500 land transactions made by The Nature Conservancy in the U.S. since 1980, we found that over 50% of land sold for conservation was sold below fair market value. This willingness of landowners across the country to sell their land below fair market value for conservation results in "bargain sales". While this is a common feature in land conservation, we know of no prior efforts to map and predict where bargain sales are likely to occur. In addition, reaching a better understanding of landowners' willingness to participate in conservation seems highly relevant in the U.S., where 61% of all land is privately held. In this study, we identify drivers of bargains sales' occurrence and size using a sequential model, fitted on TNC dataset. Knowing how and why bargain sales happen and taking that into account when mapping land costs throughout the continental U.S. changes which regions are identified as priorities for protection. We also examine the relationship between bargains sales and two other sources of social support for conservation: the number of conservation ballot measures proposed and the average size of philanthropic gifts to TNC in a county.
