The Forest Legacy Program provides grants for conservation easements or land purchases through state partners to protect environmentally sensitive forest lands while maintaining private ownership and working forests. The Uniform Appraisal Standards for Federal Land Acquisitions – “Yellowbook”, which presents current standards for grant requests, is posted for reference here.
The landscape of urban open spaces can range from playing fields to highly maintained environments to relatively natural landscapes. Urban open spaces can be well protected due to conservation status, but unprotected areas may especially be at risk due to development pressures. As dense population centers, urban areas have opportunities to embrace “smart growth” to balance development needs with important ecological, economic, and social benefits of open spaces.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Climate Change website emphasizes adaptation, mitigation and engagement to address impacts to wildlife and natural habitat. USFWS’s efforts to address climate change issues are detailed in Rising to the Urgent Challenge: Strategic Plan for Responding to Accelerating Climate Change.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Coastal Program is a non-regulatory program that provides technical and financial assistance to landowners and coastal communities to restore or protect fish and wildlife habitat on public and private lands.
The USFWS Habitat and Resource Conservation website details current programs that can support conservation efforts across the nation.
Ecological resilience often describes the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly without shifting to an alternative state or losing function or services. Building resilience can reduce risks and vulnerabilities of ecosystems – and the communities that depend on them – to climate change impacts.
This interactive policy brief from the Center for Large Landscape Conservation highlights advocacy opportunities for the conservation community to increase connectivity at a landscape scale.