Conservation from the bottom up: A forestry case study

There is currently great interest in increasing the total land area in ‘conservation’ by the year 2030 to stabilize biodiversity and reduce net carbon emissions to combat climate change; however, there remains a lack of clarity on what actually constitutes ‘conservation.’ Land placed into permanent protection from resource utilization falls under the category of land preservation (e.g. National Parks) where land ‘conservation’ can include resource utilization to meet human resource needs. Land ‘preservation’ is an effective means of protecting habitat, but isolation of preserved parcels can limit their effectiveness. The trade-off between land preservation and conservation requires that we consider land use strategies in a global context and as complementary of one another. Most assessments for increasing land conservation are based on vegetative and wildlife inventory, where far fewer assessments are based on soils or belowground accounting. Herein, we present a soil based perspective that could be useful in evaluating the capacity for different land management strategies to meet broader conservation goals, including 30 by 30 and provide a focus on forest management to demonstrate our approach. Our soils-based assessment of different land-use practices suggests that land management practices that cause minimal soil disturbance, generate minimal bare soil, and exhibit a dominance of native species would be effective at achieving meaningful land conservation benefits while continuing to meet human resource needs. Incentivizing conservation oriented land management practices could dramatically accelerate our ability to achieve large scale conservation objectives such as 30 by 30.