Conservation Planning: Informed Decisions for a Healthier Planet

“In a world where conservation planning is all too often separate from conservation practice and where the planning literature is scattered, academic and fractious, this book offers a unique marriage of the practical and the academic, of planning and practice, and of where and how to achieve conservation outcomes in real life situations. I highly commend it.” —Kent H. Redford, Archipelago Consulting

“In Conservation Planning: Informed Decisions for a Healthier Planet, Craig Groves and Ed Game have produced a well organized, easy to read account of pragmatic approaches to safeguarding creation. Our grand children and great grand children will thank us if the ways of thinking and working described in this book are applied widely, urgently, and soon.” —David W. Hulse, University of Oregon

“Craig Groves and Edward Game’s opus on “Conservation Planning” is underpinned by carefully selected scientific literature, strongly illustrated with the work of The Nature Conservancy and others, and up-to-date in including emerging themes like climate change. Recommended for all those seeking solutions to the challenges of planning ecosystem conservation.” —Thomas Brooks, International Union for Conservation of Nature

“Craig Groves and Eddie Game have done it—they have captured the extensive collective wisdom of their many years putting conservation science and planning into practice—and show how scientific rigor combined with stakeholder-driven objectives can lead to more transparent and better outcomes for conservation. The scientific case and public support for nature protection will improve by leaps and bounds if we heed the good guidance so compellingly presented in Conservation Planning.”  —Mary Ruckelshaus, Stanford University

“As human populations grow, national economies continue to develop of the back of natural resources and the climate rapidly changes, where and how best to conserve nature is becoming an increasingly complex question. Planning for nature conservation now requires a range of skills across the ecological, social, economic, and political sciences. This book, framed with a vast array of excellent real world examples and the contemporary approaches, is a necessary addition for anyone interested in the practice of conservation planning.” —James Watson, Society for Conservation Biology

In a world of finite resources and complex environmental problems, we are faced with tough choices. Conservation Planning brings academic rigor to a pragmatic guidebook on making informed decisions about the way we navigate our relationship with the natural world. The authors draw on their extensive “hands-on” experience to provide an essential resource for practitioners, students, or researchers of conservation, natural resource management, or landscape planning and architecture.

Conserving nature can be a complicated business whether in an urban environment, a production landscape dominated by agriculture or forestry, or more natural environments. Increasingly, planning and implementing a nature conservation or natural resource management project requires a range of skills across the ecological, social, economic, and political sciences. Conservation Planning provides the methods, tools, approaches, and case studies to plan a nature conservation project from inception to implementation and monitoring and evaluation. It draws on a wide range of disciplines and literature from conservation biology, landscape architecture, and land-use planning to decision science, natural resource economics, and sustainability. 

The book’s primary audience is conservation scientists, planners, and practitioners in nongovernmental organizations; natural resource agency biologists and scientists; and professional landscape architects and land-use planners in both developed and developing nations throughout the world. With decades of experience as conservation planners, the authors have combined the fields of spatial planning (establishing priority places for conservation) and strategic planning into one overall planning approach. The book’s underlying philosophy is that effective planning is really about making tough choices of where to allocate resources to achieve the conservation outcomes of a project, program, or conservation initiative. It should prove to be an essential guide to anyone involved in nature conservation writ large.