Land cover and land use change is a major cause of biodiversity loss worldwide. In the US, land use regulation is predominantly a local undertaking, administered by city and county planners. Therefore, local planners have an outsized role in helping to conserve biodiversity. To the extent that biodiversity conservation is a priority to local jurisdictions, planners often struggle to balance conservation priorities with other, often competing goals, such as building housing for a growing human population. Given these realities, there is an urgent need for planners to have access to information that will help them incorporate biodiversity conservation into their work. Ecologists are responding to this need, but they may not be sufficiently cognizant of the complexities of planning to provide planners with the right information. We addressed this potential gap in the translation of ecological science to planning professionals by surveying planners in the US Southeast, a biodiversity hotspot, about the type and format of information they need to conserve nature in their jurisdictions. In June and July 2017, we sent electronic survey requests to randomly-selected planners in counties and municipalities in ten states. Surveys were developed in consultation with a separate subset of planners in the study area.
Results/Conclusions
We received responses from 233 planners, or 20% of targeted participants. Respondents were located in states and jurisdictions in proportion to relative state population size and the relative number of counties and municipalities in each state. The most important conservation concerns to planners and the residents of their jurisdictions were poor water quality, degradation of streams/rivers, and tree loss, although planners were also engaged in a very wide variety of conservation activities. Planners were most interested in receiving information about best management practices, how to convince others of the value of nature conservation, and how to balance nature conservation with socio-economic needs. Planners identified “increasing awareness among the public, developers, and decision-makers” as one of the most feasible ways to address nature conservation concerns. With respect to scientific information, planners reported that it would be more useful if it were free to access; it were tailored to their region; it had more feasible recommendations; it included other planning concerns; its recommendations were in order of importance; and, it were easier to find. Overall, our results suggest a strong need among the planning community in the US Southeast for practical research that explicitly addresses the socio-economic context of biodiversity conservation.