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For purposes of this work, we define land conservation as strategic investments in land acquisitions, easements, and stewardship for conservation and/or preservation purposes to protect ecological and socioeconomic values in the Gulf Coast Region (GCR). We define acquisition as land acquired from a willing seller who enters into a purchase agreement and sells the title of a property to a land trust or government (i.e., fee title or fee simple). In contrast, easement limits specific uses of the land to achieve specific conservation objectives while keeping the land in the owner’s control. Stewardship is a general term for land management, restoration, and maintenance of lands specifically applied here to fee title acquisitions and conservation easements on private lands.

The RESTORE Council distinguished five goals in their comprehensive plan (Table 3) as a framework for helping to restore the ecosystems and economies of the GCR. For purposes of the SCA project we defined goals as desired ecological and socioeconomic outcomes that can be achieved through land conservation. Priorities are components of a single goal that focus on a specific aspect in achieving the goal. Plans are documents compiled by various organizations or government agencies that outline land conservation actions. Projects are plans that are funded for implementation or already implemented. Conservation targets are areas of land that are of interest for land conservation. The vast majority of identified “conservation targets” are formalized in existing plans and databases.

Classifying land conservation plans based on the values or benefits they provide with respect to RESTORE goals bestows conservation planners with an important understanding of conservation efforts within a region. In this work, the conservation plans within the GCR were classified into five groups that reflect the RESTORE goals (Table 3). These goals provide the framework for an integrated restoration approach at local, state, tribal, and federal levels.

The conservation community along the GCR represents a diverse set of stakeholders with wide-ranging interests, priorities, and objectives. In this work, the established conservation targets were identified through the Gulf of Mexico Alliance (GOMA), Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), Migratory Bird Joint Ventures (JVs), State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs), the Partnership for Gulf Coast Land Conservation (PGCLC), National Estuary Programs (NEPs), and many others to forgo the “priority resource setting” process that so often bogs down similar efforts. To collate these priorities, the SCA project team mined available plans and databases and classified priorities and objectives contained therein by a variety of scales and levels (Table 2 and Table 3). This assessment was intended to be extensive, but not exhaustive, as only the primary considerations for conservation needed to be captured for prioritizing the landscape. Cataloging the priorities and objectives in this way enables stakeholders to identify scale mismatches, pluralities, and omissions that left unresolved would ultimately undermine any overarching effort to unify these individual plans and designs.

Within the study area, an extensive list was created of existing and proposed conservation plans and projects between 1998 and 2018 (see Appendix A). Each plan underwent an initial review which was used to identify the geographic extent of the plan, the conservation strategies (i.e., acquisition, stewardship, and easement) included in the plan, and the RESTORE goal(s) to which the plan is associated (Table 3). To reduce subjectivity, a second reviewer independently recorded the same information for cross-validation. A plan’s review was considered complete if the two reviews were identical. Otherwise, a third reviewer was used to settle differences. Only plans that addressed at least one conservation strategy as part of the plan content were included in the final inventory.