The heterogeneous landscape of the eastern United States has resulted in a diversity of conservation interventions including public protected areas, private lands held in easements, and open space managed at various levels of intensity. Given the pressures of expected land use and land cover change, particularly in the Southern Piedmont ecoregion, multi-scale and comprehensive data are needed to prioritize conservation actions. We assessed local and regional indicators of conservation success, within each of the above conservation efforts, across an urban-rural gradient. We specifically looked at predicted local abundance and estimated regional habitat quality for habitat guilds in 75 forest patches in Upstate South Carolina.
Results/Conclusions
Regionally we found that easements had the greatest conservation value across habitat types as compared to protected areas and other managed lands. We found that all conservation interventions were mixed in their impacts across habitat types. For example, the relative estimated habitat quality in easements was almost 2.5 greater for forest guilds and shrub guilds then for grassland guilds. Locally we found that for most species the matrix type that the land use was embedded within had no effect, for example, the estimated abundance of the Carolina Chickadee was not affected by urban vs forest matrix types. These data suggest opportunities for conservation within suburban and agricultural landscape particularly if local ecosystem management considers the needs of local species of conservation concern. In addition, the regional data suggests that conservation on private lands will be essential in the face of future change.