Rural Residential Stewardship in Private Lands Conservation

Exurban migration from urban cities to rural residential private lands is the fastest growing form of land use in the U.S. Between 1990 and 2000, approximately 30 million acres were developed for private exurban lands nationwide, rapidly changing nearby ecosystems and biodiversity populations.

The continued expansion of exurban development poses a threat to ecosystem health and wildlife, as these regions contain more species of conservation value, resulting in habitat loss and fragmentation, biodiversity declines, reduction in soil nutrient cycling and changes in ecosystem processes.

Conservation within these regions will be crucial to manage climate change. Clean water, ecosystem health, wildlife habitat, energy production, & many other important ecological processes depend on the actions taken by rural stakeholders.

Moreover, most biologically productive lands are private lands. This has the potential to bridge a divide in conservation that could afford significant impacts. Rural residential private lands offer opportunities for conservation that are different from protected areas, reserves, urban areas, and even ranch or agriculture lands. For these reasons, efforts to protect biodiversity may require less reliance on protected lands & more on private lands as protected areas alone won't be enough to address the climate crisis and species extinction.

Much of Colorado's rural private lands are wildland-urban interface (WUI) regions. These are areas of transition between unoccupied wildlands and human development. These rapidly growing emergent systems arise from interactions between humans and the natural world and come with unique risks, services, and conservation opportunities.

WUIs emerge from coupled societal and environmental systems, therefore, people can work to improve future dynamics and conditions. A more robust conceptualization of conservation needs to include efforts and initiatives within WUI regions that prioritize ecological restoration and conservation while engaging with rural communities in order to find solutions that work for stakeholders and the environment. Future management of WUIs should place an emphasis on trade-offs among development practices, ecosystem processes, and local stakeholders.

Given these implications, the WUI should be a focus of statewide discussions on natural resource issues and policies, in which local leadership and voices have a say in decision-making. This will require new partnerships with rural stakeholders, rethinking of environmental impacts and practices, as well as new communication strategies. To move forward more effectively, we need an interdisciplinary framework that expands on the original focus of wildfire threat, and works to combine this with other frameworks that emphasize conservation practices.

Ecosystems are subject to both natural and human-caused disturbances, such as drought, flood, fire, development, pollution, and landscaping practices, in addition to other drivers of ecological change. On top of this, rural areas affected by human encroachment also experience habitat degraded by roads, invasive species, impacts from livestock & domestic animals, waste runoff, noise and light pollution, loss of wildlife from vehicles, & heavy use of chemicals such as pesticides and other pollutants.

Despite their influence on national environmental policy, small-scale rural residents and landowners currently do not receive the same level of support as large-scale rural landowners, such as land trusts, ranches and farms, which often have more institutional and financial assistance. This gap in conservation has likely been overlooked due to the complexity of managing natural resources on private lands through traditional management styles. Research has historically focused on wild or semi-wild lands, regardless of land use, acreage or impact, resulting in an inequitable portion of funding and efforts, despite the potential exurban development has to alter biodiversity and other conservation outcomes.

The Juniper Initiative (TJI) is a community-based organization supporting conservation through land stewardship within the rural residential communities of Larimer County, Colorado.

Our mission is to support conservation efforts in Northern Colorado's rural communities in order to aid wildlife, restore habitat, and protect local ecosystems and ecosystem services. We believe that local land stewardship in rural and wildland-urban interface (or WUI) communities plays a key role in the conservation of natural resources and wildlife.

However, in order reduce further pressures on rural communities, support is needed to share the responsibility and accountability for environmental impacts and ecosystem protections. The exchange of land stewardship for community support can help reach conservation targets and benefit rural communities.

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