Conservation in a full world : exploring the relationships among land use policy, human communities, and ecological integrity in the northern forest

The question of how to use land use policy to meet conservation goals has never been more salient. Conservationists have tried a variety of policy tools to slow the loss of biodiversity, but the effectiveness and unintended consequences of these tools have rarely been tested. In a time when wildlife and humans increasingly share the landscape, it is important to understand which policies are successful at conserving biodiversity, and what effects those policies have on adjacent human communities. This research is aimed at understanding the effects of regional land use policy on human and ecological communities. In this dissertation, I investigate the outcomes of two large-scale policy approaches in rural mixed-use regions in the United States. I assessed differences in biodiversity and human wellbeing associated with each of these large-scale policy approaches, including accounting for the effects of more traditional land use tools such as public land and zoning. I compared biodiversity and wellbeing outcomes first at the regional scale, in order to understand the effects of large-scale policy, and then at the township scale to quantify the effects of forest cover, development, public land, and zoning. I further examined the factors that make a conservation policy successful, and evaluated the possible outcomes for biodiversity under each large-scale policy approach for future scenarios of economic and political change. Important findings from this research include 1) Restrictive regional land use policy was not associated with increased biodiversity in the regions I analyzed; 2) Restrictive regional and use policy was associated with somewhat increased metrics of human wellbeing; 3) The effects of public land and zoning on both biodiversity and human wellbeing were highly dependent on the regional context, and; 4) More restrictive regional land use policy is associated with decreased biodiversity loss in most future scenarios. These finding suggest that more restrictive regional land use policy does not harm human communities, but is likely to lessen or prevent biodiversity loss in comparison with regions that do not have this kind of restrictive policy. Top-down, restrictive land use policy thus represents the possibility of a win-win situation for rural regions: it appears to promote human wellbeing through a variety of mechanisms while also making a region's wildlife community more resilient to economic and political change.