Search

Private land often encompasses biodiversity features of high conservation value, but its protection is not straightforward. Commonly, landowners' perspectives are rightfully allowed to influence conservation actions. This unlikely comes without consequences on biodiversity or other aspects such as economic considerations, but these consequences are rarely quantitatively considered in decision-making. In the context of boreal mire protection in Finland, we report how acknowledging landowners' resistance to protection changes the combination of mires selected to conservation compared to ignoring landowners' opinions. Using spatial prioritization, we quantify trade-offs arising between the amount of landowners' resistance, protected biodiversity, and financial costs in different conservation scenarios. Results show that the trade-offs cannot be fully avoided. Nevertheless, we show that the systematic examination of the trade-offs opens up options to alleviate them. This can promote the evaluation of different conservation policy outcomes, enabling better-informed conservation decisions and more effective and socially sustainable allocation of conservation resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landowners can intentionally impair biodiversity values occurring on their land to pre-empt biodiversity protection. This often leads to significant negative effects on biodiversity. We studied whether landowners in Finland engaged in pre-emptive loggings after they were notified that their wooded mires are candidate sites for a mire protection program. After the notification, harvesting rates of the candidate wooded mires were significantly lower compared to harvesting rates of similar but non-candidate wooded mires. Annual and monthly harvesting rates indicated that notifying landowners of the conservation potential did not launch systematic pre-emptive logging behavior. Nevertheless, part of the candidate wooded mires were logged, so some landowners place more weight on other values than the biodiversity ones. Pre-emptive behavior has been observed in other studies suggesting that many country- or system-specific factors such as cultural background or level of compensation can affect landowners' behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]