Conservation Results of Scenarios
All three scenarios started with a similar and realistic conservation budget (equivalent to the last-decade's Florida Forever conservation funding). Given this starting point, all three scenarios were able to generate conservation networks which improve over the current system. However, we found important differences between scenarios.
Some of these related to the variation of conservation strategy, and others more with the influence of overall land use planning and potential real estate market changes.
- In terms of quantity of conservation, switching from a 50/50 to a 90/10 easements strategy, gets roughly 1/3 more conservation on the ground.
- The quality of the conservation achieved is difficult to assess. On the one hand, private lands valuable for conservation are converted to conservation-aware managment. However, this comes somewhat at the expend of the loss of large publicly-managed biodiversity cores areas.
- In management terms, the coordination of fee-simple and easements transactions increase the complexity of the conservation planning efforts required. They involve thousands of conservation easement deals. This scenarios will require the PFLCC to consider which institutional mechanisms are feasible and necessary to implement this scenario.