Conserving mountains is important for protecting biodiversity because they have high beta diversity and endemicity, facilitate species movement, and provide numerous ecosystem benefits for people. Mountains are often thought to have lower levels of human modification and contain more protected area than surrounding lowlands. To examine this, we compared biogeographic attributes of the largest, contiguous, mountainous region on...

Effective conservation of biological diversity on private lands will require changes in land‐use policy and development practice. Conservation development (CD) is an alternative form of residential development in which homes are built on smaller lots and clustered together and the remainder of the property is permanently protected for conservation purposes. We assessed the degree to which CD is permitted and encouraged by loca...

Many wide‐ranging mammal species have experienced significant declines over the last 200 years; restoring these species will require long‐term, large‐scale recovery efforts. We highlight 5 attributes of a recent range‐wide vision‐setting exercise for ecological recovery of the North American bison ( Bison bison ) that are broadly applicable to other species and restoration targets. The result of the exercise, the “Vermejo Stat...

To address increasing fragmentation, conservation biologists have focused on protecting core habitat areas and maintaining connectivity among protected areas. Wildlife corridors, strips of relatively intact habitat designed to connect habitat fragments, may enhance connectivity, but little empirical evidence supports the idea that large mammals prefer to use corridors rather than the surrounding developed landscape. In Sonoma...

More than half of the land in the United States is privately owned. Private lands harbor a great amount of biodiversity, including at least some habitat for 95% of the federally listed species in the United States. It is important to conduct conservation biology research on private lands, but our review of the literature indicates that few conservation‐oriented field studies are conducted on private property. Based on our succ...