Conservation Planning with Multiple Organizations and Objectives

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of conservation organizations worldwide. It is now common for multiple organizations to operate in the same landscape in pursuit of different conservation goals. New objectives, such as maintenance of ecosystem services, will attract additional funding and new organizations to conservation. Systematic conservation planning helps in the design of spatially explicit management actions that optimally conserve multiple landscape features (e.g., species, ecosystems, or ecosystem services). But the methods used in its application implicitly assume that a single actor implements the optimal plan. We investigated how organizational behavior and conservation outcomes are affected by the presence of autonomous implementing organizations with different objectives. We used simulation models and game theory to explore how alternative behaviors (e.g., organizations acting independently or explicitly cooperating) affected an organization's ability to protect their feature of interest, and investigated how the distribution of features in the landscape influenced organizations' attitudes toward cooperation. Features with highly correlated spatial distributions, although typically considered an opportunity for mutually beneficial conservation planning, can lead to organizational interactions that result in lower levels of protection. These detrimental outcomes can be avoided by organizations that cooperate when acquiring land. Nevertheless, for cooperative purchases to benefit both organizations' objectives, each must forgo the protection of land parcels that they would consider to be of high conservation value. Transaction costs incurred during cooperation and the sources of conservation funding could facilitate or hinder cooperative behavior.