Prospering from nature : helping landowners protect and enhance ecosystem services

Abstract

Around the country, ranchers and family forest landowners face complex challenges that threaten their ability to stay on the land and maintain their operations. These include high demand for competing land uses, an aging population, pressure from environmental regulation, and shrinking profit margins. While landowners strive to keep their operations intact, they are increasingly recognizing the natural benefits, or ecosystem services, that their private working lands provide. At the same time, a growing number of mechanisms for compensating landowners for these services and their conservation is emerging. To keep working lands in operation and improve ecosystem health, many family forest and ranch owners are diversifying their operations through stewardship-based opportunities. These programs provide financial and other benefits to landowners in return for the ecosystem services they provide through sound land and water management practices, and are called payment for ecosystem service, or PES, programs. This fact sheet series tells stories of PES in action–real projects, real people, and innovative approaches.