The Wildlife Professional

and a retreat from urban living. The Challenge has made stream restoration a focus because of the endangered bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus), and to date the group has restored 38 miles of instream habitat. More than 350 landowners use integrated weed management to combat invasive plants and more than 90 landowners are part of a program that helps reduce grizzly bear conflicts with livestock and humans by sanitarily removing livestock carcasses.

South Carolina’s ACE Basin Project began in 1988 when a coalition of agency, NGO, and private interests recognized the need to protect the large, undeveloped estuary where the Ashepoo, Comba-hee, and Edisto (ACE) rivers merge before flowing into the Atlantic Ocean. Using the same ingredients we’ve seen elsewhere—an LCA along with community and financial incentives—the Project has protected 157,000 acres, of which 64,000 acres are privately owned and protected through conservation easements. Again, many of the private properties are recreational investments. According to Mark Purcell, manager of the ACE Basin NWR, “Now it’s to the point that if you don’t place an easement on your property your neighbors wonder what’s wrong with you.” That’s an incredible stage for any conservation project—to be so advanced that peer pressure is operating on behalf of conservation!

The Agency Role

It’s evident that, every year, Americans spend large amounts of money for land with fish and wildlife resources, either by joining a club or forming an investment partnership. The question remains, however, whether agencies should spend resources to encourage recreational land investments in strategic places and, if so, how? If a wildlife agency has limited acquisition dollars should those dollars be spent on easements versus fee title acquisitions? Many of the best examples of private investments in conservation involve wealthy individuals–would encouraging more private investments be catering to the wealthy? Sometimes land that provides wildlife-dependent recreation does not provide the same habitat features agencies manage on nearby public wildlife areas. Should the agency still spend resources to protect these “less desirable” habitat types? How about simply protecting them from development in the interest of habitat connectivity and buffer areas that would allow public wildlife areas to adapt to climate change? These are a few questions we must answer as we work toward better directing the billions of dollars that Americans spend each year on wildlife-dependent investments.

Conservation easements (yellow), including those that are part of recreational land investments, are an important component of the protected land base in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley. Several of these easements provide habitat to dense populations of grizzly bears (green circles).