The Living Landscapes Program

The Living Landscapes Program is an innovative concept for conservation in the 21st century. By looking through the eyes of animals - and following them beyond borders - this new Wildlife Conservation Society initiative will develop better ways for people and wildlife to share the earth's living landscapes.

The WCS Living Landscapes Program's approach explicitly places wildlife at the center of our conservation strategies, but recognizes that few places on earth remain free from human influence. Consequently, the Living Landscapes Program develops and tests wildlife-based conservation strategies that take into account human impact, and we link monitoring of wildlife directly to assessing conservation progress. By pursuing a common set of strategies and approaches at sites across the world, our program promotes inter-site research and learning and develops models of conservation project management that are broadly applicable.

The difference?

In contrast to traditional efforts, the WCS Living Landscapes Program sets priorities for conservation by looking through the eyes of wildlife. We develop and test practical, site-based approaches to conserving wildlife and wildlands.

Existing regional or global priority-setting strategies such as Global 200, Hotspots or Gap Analysis, remain vital to ensure that a representative sample of the world's plants, animals and landscapes receive conservation attention. But while these strategies help us target scarce resources at the most globally important biological areas, they tell us little about how to manage each priority site. Nor do they define how large or small the site should be to ensure that ecologically viable populations of plants and animals persist within the site.

Key concepts

• Parks and reserves are not enough.Conservation focused solely within the boundaries of national parks, or community forests, or trophy-hunting conservancies, often does not succeed because wildlife, ecological processes, and human resource-uses tend to spill across these political borders. 
• Landscapes are shared by people and wildlife.  As people around the world continue to expand into wilderness area, and as we successfully conserve healthy wildlife populations, the needs of people and the needs of wildlife will increasingly clash.  Understanding how to prevent or minimize human-wildlife conflicts within and across land-use zones is essential to ensure the long-term survival of wildlife and wildlands.
• The needs of wildlife define our focal landscapes. To set priorities for conservation it is better to use the ecological needs of wildlife, rather than political boundaries, to define the conservation landscape. We must focus on key threats to wildlife and wildlands to plan effective conservation.
• Our approach is threat based. For effective conservation, we must identify threats to wildlife and the ecosystems within which they are embedded.  Many of these threats affect not only biodiversity and ecosystem function, but also human economies based on natural resources.  Therefore, we involve stakeholders to find common ground and recruit partners.
• Conservation must be cost-effective. Funding for biodiversity conservation is not growing as fast as human demand for resources and the speed that wildlife and wildlands are being lost. Consequently we need to set new priorities for conservation spending and develop more cost-effective conservation tools.

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Beyond Parks and Reserves

The Wildlife Conservation Society believes that protected areas must remain at the core of all nations' biodiversity conservation plans. These areas typically contain a higher diversity and abundance of plants and animals than landscapes managed primarily for economic use. Yet, parks and reserves are always embedded in larger landscapes of human influence and are seldom sacrosanct. Regardless of how large or small a protected area may be, the plants and animals it contains are often threatened either directly or indirectly by human resource-use activities.Management of parks and reserves cannot, therefore, occur in isolation from the surrounding human populations, but must take into account where and how human activities conflict with biodiversity conservation, and where conservation adversely impacts human welfare. As human populations continue to expand over the next 50 years, the incentive for over-exploiting natural resources within and outside of protected areas will likely increase and the need for biodiversity conservation tools that help to identify and implement mutually-beneficial solutions for both wildlife and humans will become even more important. The WCS Living Landscapes Program seeks to develop these tools.

The Program's Focus: Wildlife

In the past, attempts to conserve biodiversity within landscapes that span land-use boundaries have typically focused on watershed management or ecosystem management. Unfortunately these concepts are ecologically nebulous, as there is no simple way to define where an ecosystem ends or whether watersheds are ecologically relevant management units. More importantly, neither concept leads easily to a clear understanding of what the targets of conservation investments should be within these landscapes. Without knowing what we are trying to save we have no measurable outcomes of our conservation actions. We are left not knowing what we are conserving, how we will know if we have been successful, and whether or not our spending was worthwhile.

Focusing on wildlife species requires us to be specific about their population and habitat requirements and better understand how and where wildlife and human needs may conflict. This helps us to explicitly define the size and shape of the landscape needed to ensure the long-term persistence of wildlife populations and the underlying ecological processes upon which they depend. Using the status of wildlife populations as a proxy for landscape health, quality and/or integrity, allows us to be specific about where and why conservation investments are needed, what such investments are designed to achieve, and how the success or failure of these interventions will be measured. Focusing on wildlife makes the landscape to be managed geographically unambiguous and ecologically meaningful, and makes the targets for, and outcomes of, conservation investments explicit and measurable.  By focusing on wildlife, we can see the key threats clearly, search for the most effective interventions and map out the steps needed to reach our goals.

The Importance of Wildlands

WCS believes that conservation of wildlands is important because they are the last bastions of ecological and evolutionary processes that remain largely unfettered by the influence of humans. Wildlands are extraordinary places because they still support richly diverse and abundant assemblages of plants and animals that are often particularly susceptible to and intolerant of human behavior, and typically no longer exist in areas dominated by humans.

The Time Is Now

Growing human demand for goods and services is placing increasing pressure on natural resources and threatens the long-term survival of many wild animals and the wild places where they live. Yet donor support for traditional biodiversity conservation may not increase fast enough to stop these wildlife and wildlands from disappearing. Thus, we need to develop new tools for biodiversity conservation that are smarter and cheaper. In the past, conservation strategies were developed to fit within protected areas, or community lands, or private holdings. But we know that wildlife, ecological processes, and human resource-uses often spill across these political borders. The Living Landscapes Program is a new initiative to help develop cost-effective conservation tools that avoid or resolve clashes with human land-uses, within landscapes defined by the needs of wildlife.

Key Participants

One of the primary goals of the Living Landscapes Program is to identify and engage key stakeholders in the conservation process. One way this is achieved is through a participatory and iterative threats asessment process. Stakeholders are invited as experts to contribute their perceptions to  identify, prioritize, quantify and map threats to biodiversity and sustainable natural resource use. Participants are thereby given a role in directing WCS activities and an opportunity to join us in abating threats and monitoring conservation projects. Through this process stakeholders themselves identify problems and actions best suited to address them, identify areas for institutional strengthening or coordination and in the process strengthen their involvement and faith in the conservation process. As a result, a wide variety of conservation partners including local community groups, governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as private sector companies, are working together within the Living Landscapes Program.  The Living Landscape Program's participatory threats assessments lead directly to better planning of conservation projects and to political support for rapid action.

On The Ground

The Living Landscapes Program is currently working within an expanding number of landscape conservation areas, where the full range of approaches are being implemented. The program is also evolving into a network hub for associated projects that are adopting those approaches that most meet their needs. Overall, the program seeks design input and feedback from all WCS site-based projects, and shares expertise and lessons in return. By so doing, the Landscape Approach will permeate throughout WCS and improve our on-the-ground conservation effectiveness.