Developing a Conservation Investment Strategy for the Tamaulipan Brushlands

April 17, 2024 | Posted in Conservation Programs

As part of the RGJV plan to increase grassland conservation in the Tamaulipan Brushlands (TB) ecoregion, staff have been working on the initial steps to develop a TB Conservation Investment Strategy (CIS). In a nutshell the CIS could be defined as ‘an overarching, landscape–level strategy that is used by regional partners to help guide their grassland management and investment in south Texas and in NE Mexico’. More simply stated, the TB CIS will be a tool that can help partners to improve their ability to prioritize, implement, and evaluate conservation actions in the region. For this effort we decided to use Landscape Design: a stakeholder-driven conservation planning, management, and monitoring system developed by Playa Lakes JV that integrates landowner values with conservation values to achieve biological goals.

With these initial goals in mind we convened partners from the US and Mexico (federal, state, non-governmental, and academic stakeholders as well as a handful of landowners) to a workshop in Corpus Christi, TX last January to kick off the process. Throughout the meeting lively discussions provided valuable input that started shaping the CIS biological and social goals as well as the initial evaluation of the geographic scope, drivers, and social values of the region.

One of the most prominent takeaways from the meeting was that there is a real and urgent need to better understand what motivates landowners to participate in conservation programs and/or what limits their interest in those programs. Regarding next steps, staff will be working on the science component of the planning process to better define the biological goals as well as looking for opportunities to partner with experts that can help us address the missing and much-needed human dimensions component of the CIS.