The United States' tradition of conserving fish, wildlife, habitats, and cultural resources dates to the mid-19th century. States have long sought to manage fish and wildlife species within their borders, whereas many early federal conservation efforts focused on setting aside specific places as parks, sanctuaries, or reserves. With advances in landscape ecology over the past quarter-century, conservation planners, scientists, and practitioners began to stress the importance of conservation efforts at the scale of landscapes and seascapes. These larger areas were thought to harbor relatively large numbers of species that are likely to maintain population viability and sustain ecological processes and natural disturbance regimes - often considered critical factors in conserving biodiversity. By focusing conservation efforts at the level of whole ecosystems and landscape, practitioners can better attempt to conserve the vast majority of species in a particular ecosystem. Successfully addressing the large-scale, interlinked problems associated with landscape degradation will necessitate a planning process that bridges different scientific disciplines and across sectors, as well as an understanding of complexity, uncertainty, and the local context of conservation work. The landscape approach aims to develop shared conservation priorities across jurisdictions and across many resources to create a single, collaborative conservation effort that can meet stakeholder needs. Conservation of habitats, species, ecosystem services, and cultural resources in the face of multiple stressors requires governance structures that can bridge the geographic and jurisdictional boundaries of the complex socio-ecological systems in which landscape-level conservation occurs. The Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC) Network was established to complement and add value to the many ongoing state, tribal, federal, and nongovernmental efforts to address the challenge of conserving species, habitats, ecosystem services, and cultural resources in the face of large-scale and long-term threats, including climate change. A Review of the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives evaluates the purpose, goals, and scientific merits of the LCC program within the context of similar programs, and whether the program has resulted in measurable improvements in the health of fish, wildlife, and their habitats.

“Landscape conservation,” a now common term in conservation biology, emphasizes the importance of planning at scales that encompass ecological processes and species migrations, and addresses large-scale environmental threats. Formal frameworks for evaluating the effectiveness of these efforts are rare, however, and made difficult because these multi-scalar efforts involve many actors over multiple jurisdictions and long timescales. Recognizing the need for collaborative responses to large-scale environmental stressors such as climate change, the Department of the Interior supported a network of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) from 2009 until 2018. As one of these twenty-two LCCs, the Pacific Islands Climate Change Cooperative (PICCC) was established with the charter purpose of assisting those who manage native species, island ecosystems, and key cultural resources in adapting their management to climate change for the continuing benefit of the people of the Pacific Islands. Guided by a diverse steering committee of land/resource managers, the PICCC serviced a vast area across Hawaiʻi and the US-Affiliated Pacific Islands. This report presents key findings from evaluative research investigating PICCC’s achievements in the Hawaiian Islands between 2009 and 2018. Based on interviews and a survey, the report describes the foundational conditions from which the PICCC set out to establish a landscape conservation framework, the challenges it faced, its goals and achievements, and transferable lessons from the experience for any conservation community working with limited resources across large expanses of land and ocean. The research underlying this report serves as a record of the unique landscape conservation and climate adaptation approach developed by the PICCC’s steering committee and partners over the course of their collaboration, and points to the benefits that have been and could be achieved in sustained landscape-scale conservation efforts.

Scientists have been warning for years that human activity is heating up the planet and climate change is under way. We are only just beginning to acknowledge the serious effects this will have on all life on Earth. The federal government is crafting broad-scale strategies to protect wildland ecosystems from the worst effects of climate change. One of the greatest challenges is to get the latest science into the hands of resource managers entrusted with vulnerable wildland ecosystems. This book examines climate and land-use changes in montane environments, assesses the vulnerability of species and ecosystems to these changes, and provides resource managers with collaborative management approaches to mitigate expected impacts. Climate Change in Wildlands proposes a new kind of collaboration between scientists and managers--a science-derived framework and common-sense approaches for keeping parks and protected areas healthy on a rapidly changing planet.

In response to increasing conservation activity at the large landscape scale, leaders from the public, private, and nongovernmental sectors participated in two national landscape management policy dialogues and many other informal discussions in 2009. Convened by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy at The University of Montana, the intent of the dialogues was to synthesize what we know about large landscape conservation and to identify the most important needs as we move forward.