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Where agricultural land use and biodiversity conservation values overlap, conservation science has tended to focus on the challenges posed by land ownership fragmentation. However, the dynamics of land concentration also affect rural landscapes and economies upon which biodiversity conservation increasingly depends. In this study, we provide a methodological approach to measuring concentration using parcel-level data to generate a description of private landownership trends at the boundary of the Northern Rockies and the Northern Great Plains, two ecoregions of global conservation significance. Across our 25m-acre study region in Montana, USA concentration in large land ownership increased by 7 percent between 2005 and 2018. Growth of a county's largest landholding through the agglomeration of properties into a single mega-estate emerges as a recurring trend. Other drivers contribute to concentration, suggesting a mix of conservation opportunities and challenges that merits further research and consideration by academic and resource management stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increasing concentration of wealth among high net worth (HNW) individuals and their rising influence as proprietors of natural resources worldwide, the discipline of geography has only recently begun to consider the interactions between the contemporary global super-rich and systems of environmental management. This article addresses a gap in the literature related to the social and ecological implications of ranches owned by the very wealthy. Drawing from a life course perspective, we complicate static representations of landowners and examine HNW ranchland ownership dynamics in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, an iconic conservation area in the U.S. West. Four stories about HNW ranches, compiled through a composite narrative approach, describe how ranch management practices and strategies play out over time and space. The result is a set of management trajectories linked to broader geographies of the super-rich where social–ecological outcomes related to an ability to ranch with, as opposed to for, money reinforces the connections between systems of wealth, elite interests, and land control. Our findings underscore a need for future scholarly efforts attuned to HNW ranch management trajectories as consequential drivers of change in rural areas and critical conservation areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urgency and deliberateness are often at odds when executing conservation projects, especially as the scale and complexity of objectives increases. The pace of environmental degradation supports immediate and measurable action. However, best practices for adaptive governance and building resilient social-ecological systems call for more deliberate efforts and participatory processes, which can be slow. We explore conflicts between urgency and deliberateness and the potential for their reconciliation through a case study of the challenges of conserving native rangelands in North America's Northern Great Plains, an ecoregion targeted for global conservation initiatives. This region is undergoing a significant social-ecological transition, which underscores a need to rethink conservation strategies in light of the social-ecological system dynamics and potential future trajectories. Based on a structured narrative literature review process and iterative engagement with key regional stakeholders, we identify three interrelated factors critical to the system's future outcomes that illustrate system complexity as well as trade-offs between urgent and deliberate action and unilateral and multilateral approaches to conservation: (1) influences of land management on biodiversity, (2) economic restructuring and shifting land use priorities, and (3) changing climate and disturbance regimes. We identify key gaps in the literature for each factor and across the factors--an effort that informs our call for research and practice agendas that address uncertainty and complexity at regional scales through more inclusive and future-oriented approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), the most established avenue for collaborative resource management is the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (GYCC), a coordinating body comprising local units of the four federal land management agencies in the region. Coordinating ecosystem-scale land management activities has been a primary concern of the GYCC since its inception and has been the source of intense public scrutiny, especially following the 1991 “Vision Exercise” which sought a coordinated ecosystem management plan for the region. As collaborative processes remain an important tenet of modern resource management, we revisit the current discourse surrounding the emergent public opinion of interagency collaboration in the Greater Yellowstone. Using Q-method and semi-structured interviews, we identify three themes within the discourse. We consider these themes in light of continued interest in collaborative management and programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communities reliant on subsistence and small-scale production are typically more vulnerable than others to disasters such as earthquakes. We study the earthquakes that struck Nepal in the spring of 2015 to investigate their impacts on smallholder communities and the diverse trajectories of recovery at the household and community levels. We focus on the first year following the earthquakes because this is when households were still devastated, yet beginning to recover and adapt. Through survey questionnaires, focus group discussions, open-ended interviews and observations at public meetings we analyze physical impacts to farming systems and cropping cycles. We investigate respondent reports of loss and recovery through a new social-ecological recovery assessment instrument and find that diversification of livelihoods and access to common resources, alongside robust community institutions, were critical components of coping and recovery. There was widespread damage to subsistence farming infrastructure, which potentially accelerated ongoing transitions to cash crop adoption. We also find that perceptions of recovery varied widely among and within the typical predictors of recovery, such as caste and farm size, in sometimes unexpected ways. Although postdisaster recovery has material and psychosocial dimensions, our work shows that these may not change in the same direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]