Landcare & Conservation Biology: Improving the Value of Working Landscapes and Ecosystem Services
Session Organizers: Glen Stevens, Carola Haas, David J. Lowe, Dennis Garrity, and David Porter Robertson

Description: Landcare is a holistic approach to natural resource management that focuses on organizing communities to develop integrated local-regional networks and systems for the sustainable production and consumption of quality food, fiber, water, energy, and other goods and services generated by public and private lands. As such, landcare is an international movement of citizens, landowners, and professional land managers, including conservation biologists, who are working together to take care of the land in a way that produces a broad range of improved economic, social, and environmental conditions (the triple bottom line). As such, landcare contributes to the science and practice of conservation biology and links biodiversity goals to positive economic and community development objectives. Landcare activities tend to be organized locally and linked regionally along watersheds and as such are central to the conference theme, "From the Mountains to the Sea". In fact, several of the presenters in the session are landcare practitioners from the Headwaters Region of Virginia which includes the upper reaches of the James, Roanoke, and New Rivers which feed the Chesapeake Bay, Albemarle Sound, and Gulf of Mexico, respectively. Landcare has proven effective at engaging a wide range of partners across diverse geographic, economic, and political landscapes and helping them find their common ground and work toward shared goals and objectives.  The authors firmly believe that this is a paradigm that is appropriate to conservation in today's increasingly urban and global society where landscapes, lifestyles, and livelihoods are all changing at a rapid pace and in unprecedented ways. The potential of landcare is borne out by its recent spread to five continents.

The "landcare" movement began in 1986 in Australia where there are now approximately 5000 community landcare groups. Forty percent of farmers and land managers across Australia are members of these landcare groups. As many as 75% of Australian farmers are reported to utilize land stewardship techniques disseminated through the landcare network.  The power of the landcare approach is in its ability to engage the public at the grassroots and across otherwise competing institutions while transcending political views.

In the past decade, the landcare movement has spread to a dozen countries, including New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, as well as to several other African and European nations and the United States.  Landcare's international agency partners include the World Agroforestry Centre and AusAid, the Australian Government's overseas aid program.  Within the United States, community landcare groups are now thriving in the headwaters region of southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina. Landcare partners in the United States include the US Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency, the national associations of Conservation Districts, RC&D Councils, and Regional Councils in addition to local and regional partners such as land trusts and landowner groups. The presenters in this session include a diverse mix of local and international landcare partners who are working together as part of this movement.