Information for Local Conservation

• Author: James M. McElfish Jr.
• Pages: 23-30

Chapter Three—Information for Local

Conservation

Local governments use many legal tools to address land use, growth, and

development issues. With sufficient information, these can be designed

and implemented to support biodiversity conservation as an additional goal

important to communities’ long-term well-being. Reliable information can

help communities:

·recognize the need for conservation;

·identify sources of locally useful biodiversity information; and

·select the appropriate planning or regulatory tool.

Need for Conservation

Many local governments have broadly identified natural resources as an impor-

tant part of their land use objectives.1Others have not done so because their

land use plans have not been updated for many years, because they have no land

use regulations other than subdivision ordinances that do not address policy ob-

jectives, or because they have not examined available information to determine

that important natural resources exist.

The increasing trend is to include natural resources (including plant and an-

imal communities) in planning and in land use regulation. In 2000, for exam-

ple, Pennsylvania enacted amendments to its statewide municipal plan en-

abling legislation requiring all comprehensive plans to include a plan for “the

protection of natural and historic resources to the extent not preempted by

federal or state law...includ[ing] but not limited to, wetlands and aquifer re-

charge zones, woodlands, steep slopes, prime agricultural land, flood plains

[sic], unique natural areas[,] and historic sites.”2This is not a new idea for

planners. Indeed, University of Pennsylvania Prof. Ian McHarg’s influential

book, Design With Nature,published in 1969, led to many communities real-

izing that their development choices were intertwined with their environmen-

tal features and that good planning required consideration of the natural land-

scape and its functions.3

In many states, revisions to state planning laws in the 1970s and 1980s led to

local plans and ordinances intended to protect critical areas, wetlands, flood-

plains, groundwater, steep slopes, and habitats.4Still more recently, communi-

ties have begun to identify the substantial natural resource values that add to

land values, quality of life, and ecological services (such as the flood control

benefits of wetlands and the water quality benefits of forested watersheds).5

A community may decide to pursue adoption of ordinances because of well-

understood threats to the lands and waters on which the community depends

(through uncontrolled development or planning mistakes that have become ob-

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