Workshop Summary

  

As part of a continued effort to improve conservation effectiveness, the Soil and Water Conservation Society is hosting the Managing Agricultural Landscapes for Environmental Quality II: Achieving Effective Conservation (MAL II) workshop in April 2010. The workshop will build on the success achieved by Managing Agricultural Landscapes for Environmental Quality (MAL I) held in Kansas City in October 2006.

 

The new workshop is being organized around the following four themes which build on the original model:

1)      Identifying Landscape Vulnerabilities and Managing Environmental Risks

2)      Targeting Risky Behaviors in Vulnerable Landscapes

3)      Designing Institutions for Landscape Conservation

4)      Measuring Conservation Effectiveness Across Landscapes

 

As with MAL I, papers addressing these four themes will be written collaboratively by a multidisciplinary team of authors for inclusion in a post-conference publication. Each paper will be presented by the lead author and then supplemented by two “perspective papers” on topics that expand on the theme. Individuals can also contribute to the program by offering either an oral or poster presentation in one of the four theme areas above. Abstracts for these presentations will be reviewed and published. There will be poster breaks and receptions targeted for interactive discussion on each of the four themes.

 

There will again be roundtable discussions each evening to discuss the two themes addressed during the day. Workshop participants will interact and discuss the key themes with the lead authors, collaborators, and “perspective” paper authors. This discussion will also be captured and included for the post-conference publication.

 

The closing session for the conference will be a keynote presentation on Executing Effective Landscape Conservation: A Vision for the Future.

Conservation action at the landscape scale implies discovering the appropriate set of behavioral patterns for specific landscapes that optimize outcomes across economic, social, and salient natural resource dimensions, such as water quantity or quality, soil conservation, wildlife habitat, or even aesthetic values. Thinking about conservation at the landscape scale is based on optimizing multiple factors within a systems perspective where nonlinearities, feedbacks, and surprises are the norm.

 

The intent is to organize a conference that will explore the scientific support and scientific gaps for each of those four steps of landscape conservation, provide examples that may guide future research or policy discussions, and generate the excitement that will encourage the rigorous debate and discussion of needed activities for achieving conservation at the landscape scale.