Understanding variation in impacts from private protected areas across regions and protection mechanisms to inform organizational practices

Private land protection is an important and growing tool to address biodiversity loss and climate change. Thus, better empirical evidence on the effectiveness of private land protection and organizational practices, such as targeting of lands for protection and choice of protection mechanism (i.e., fee simple land acquisition and conservation easements), is needed. We addressed this gap by estimating the impacts of The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) (a large nongovernmental organization with relatively decentralized management) conservation land acquisitions and easements from 1988 to 2016 in three regions of the United States (Mid-Atlantic, New England and New York, and California). We estimated impact in terms of avoided conversion by comparing natural land cover on 3179 protected parcels with matched unprotected parcels. Nineteen of 21 ecoregional plans used threats of agriculture and development to identify priorities for protection. When regions and protection mechanisms were pooled, on average there was no evidence of avoided conversion from 1988 to 2016. Accounting for mechanisms, TNC land acquisitions avoided conversion and easements did not. TNC's easements on parcels acquired by conservation partners did avoid conversion. Limitations of these results include focus on a single measure of impact, inability to capture future avoided conversion, and low land cover change accuracy in California. Our results suggest that private land protection managers who seek to avoid land conversion in the near to medium term should increase focus on areas with higher threats. Special attention should be paid to strengthening accountability and the role of partners, improving or clarifying how easements are used, and facilitating the flow of resources to work with the greatest potential impact.

Joint Physical Custody and Adolescents' Life Satisfaction in 37 North American and European Countries

Joint physical custody, a parental care arrangement in which a child lives with each parent about equally after separation or divorce, is an increasingly common phenomenon in many Western countries. Although attention from family scholars, practitioners, and law professionals is growing, there are hardly any numbers on the prevalence of joint physical custody (JPC). Moreover, studies using large-scale representative data on the effects of JPC for children's well-being are still rare. The data for this study come from Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC), a representative cross-national survey of adolescents in 37 European and North American countries that was conducted in 2002, 2006, and 2010 and included information on students at the ages of 11, 13, and 15 years (N = 92,886). First, results revealed that symmetrical JPC after family dissolution is still very rare in the majority of countries (5% or less), but reaches 10-20% in some countries. Second, adolescents' life satisfaction in nonintact families is higher in symmetric JPC arrangements than in asymmetric care arrangements. However, after controlling for children and family characteristics, the differences disappear. Thus, it is not the symmetric JPC arrangement that induces adolescents' higher life satisfaction, but rather the children and family characteristics that are associated with the choice of such a custody arrangement by separated or divorced parents.

Effectiveness of terrestrial protected areas for conservation of lake fish communities

Freshwater protected areas are rare even though freshwater ecosystems are among the most imperiled in the world. Conservation actions within terrestrial protected areas (TPAs) such as development or resource extraction regulations may spill over to benefit freshwater ecosystems within their boundaries. Using data from 175 lakes across Ontario, Canada, we compared common indicators of fish-assemblage status (i.e., species richness, Shannon diversity index, catch per unit effort, and normalized-length size spectrum slopes) to evaluate whether TPAs benefit lake fish assemblages. Nearest neighbor cluster analysis was used to generate pairs of lakes: inside versus outside, inside versus bordering, and bordering versus outside TPAs based on lake characteristics. The diversity and abundance indicators did not differ significantly across comparisons, but normalized-length size spectrum slopes (NLSS) were significantly steeper in lakes outside parks. The latter indicated assemblage differences (greater abundances of small-bodied species) and less-efficient energy transfer through the trophic levels of assemblages outside parks. Although not significantly different, pollution- and turbidity-tolerant species were more abundant outside parks, whereas 3 of the 4 pollution-intolerant species were more abundant within parks. Twenty-one percent of the difference in slopes was related to higher total dissolved solids concentrations and angling pressure. Our results support the hypothesis that TPAs benefit lake fish assemblages and suggest that NLSS slopes are informative indicators for aquatic protected area evaluations because they represent compositional and functional aspects of communities.