New Directions and Applications for Ecosystem Science in the Private Sector

• Lindsay Boring

Members Only Area

Abstract
The key objective of the workshop is to examine the unique opportunities for the refinement of ecosystem concepts and their applications to natural resource management on privately owned lands. Privately owned lands comprise the majority of the land in the United States, as well as in most federal democracies of the world, but most past emphasis upon ecosystem applications has been focused upon public lands. Private lands require unique consideration relative to their focused management goals, diverse scales of management within constraints of ownership boundaries, and the processes and problems that traverse ownership boundaries within a landscape. Scales often preferred by ecologists for natural reserves or large publicly owned tracts, such as species ranges or watersheds, are inadequate by themselves. Private lands, and their diversity of ownerships, provide the challenge of working with very different concepts of open systems, linkages and boundaries, as well as with very different social and economic considerations.