Wildlife considerations in local land use plans: The influence of different regional planning environments in New York and Vermont

Abstract

Connecting large-scale conservation efforts to local land use planning processes is an important challenge. How conservation themes get incorporated into local land use planning depend not only on higher-level policies but also the local community characteristics. This research seeks to understand this process by looking at two landscape linkages, one located in New York and the other across the state border of New York and Vermont.

This exploratory study aims to investigate the extent of the wildlife conservation language in the existing land use plans of towns located within the linkage sites using plan content analysis. The differences in content analysis results across three regional environments are further investigated to understand the influence of local variables through statistical analysis, and of regional variables through a more close-up evaluation of the plans.

Results indicate that the wildlife language in the land use plans is influenced by the regulatory environment, information sharing by the regional planning agencies, development pressure and some contextual variables such as population density and education. Large-scale conservation efforts could focus on these differences among multiple scales and collaborate with regional planning agencies in order to increase success with implementation.