Journal
LANDSCAPE AND URBAN PLANNING
Volume 102, Issue 2, Pages 82-92Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.03.012
Keywords
Land use change; Land use policy; Forest cover; Planning; Conservation
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture
- U.S. Department of Agriculture
- Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station
- Department of Environmental Conservation [MAS009584]
- National Science Foundation [BCS-0948984]
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0948984] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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With the rate of suburban development now surpassing the amount of land protected nationally for conservation, the act of preserving land from development becomes a crucial need to support critical ecosystem services and human quality of life. While previous studies have quantified the loss of forest lands and open spaces along urban gradients, rarely have they quantified the connections between land use policies, actions and land use change. We examined social and institutional factors positively influencing land conservation efforts across two urban gradients in Massachusetts, one surrounding the large, economically growing city of Boston and the other surrounding the smaller, economically depressed city of Springfield. Despite their differences, the metropolitan areas of these two cities are both growing rapidly. We measured forest and open space protection for a sample of 15 towns, comparing this with quantitative assessments of town-level open space policies, investment in conservation planning, wealth, and social capital, in the form of local land trusts. We found significant differences between the two urban gradients, with greater land protection occurring in the Boston area towns. The towns with the largest proportion of protected land were at the urban end of both gradients. We found that land trusts played a significant role in the conservation of open spaces, and wealthier towns were more likely to have long-standing, active land trusts. This result suggests that fostering land trusts in lower-income communities could have a lasting positive impact on land conservation in the face of rapid suburbanization. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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