The opportunity exists to improve intensively managed landscapes (urban and agricultural areas dominated by human activities) through greater engagement of ecologists in the process of ecological landscape design. This approach encourages exploration of multifunctional solutions to meet the needs of growing populations in many areas around the world, while minimizing the negative impacts of human activities on the environment. This is achieved by incorporating theoretical and applied principles from the fields of landscape ecology, agroecology, and ecological design.

Policy frameworks for protected areas, such as the EU habitats directive, ensure that environmental monitoring takes place to assess the condition of these sites. However, this monitoring rarely extends to the wider countryside, and there is no obligation for private landowners to detect trends in habitat condition. Using the diffusion of innovations model as an analytical framework we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews to consider the uptake of habitat impact assessment methods throughout a community involved in private land use pursuits in Scotland.

Although the northeastern US includes extensive areas of aggrading forest, uncertainty regarding the intensity and pattern of forest harvesting hampers an understanding of important ecological processes and characteristics such as carbon and nitrogen storage, habitat quality, and forest dynamics, and impedes regional conservation and management planning.

Conservation easements offer sustainable land use and environmental conservation through land use restrictions. Opportunities exist to improve the efficiency by which parties interested in conservation easement transactions are matched, which may contribute to the overall protection of agricultural landscapes. This study utilizes stated choice questions to elicit preferences for conservation easements by both landowners, as potential easement suppliers, and land trust professionals as potential easement demanders.

Private land conservation is an increasingly popular approach to protect critical biodiversity. In the Western Cape Province of South Africa private land conservation is the focal strategy for CapeNature, the provincial conservation agency. Despite its importance, little is known about the drivers of landowner participation in the CapeNature program and how these varied motivations influence participant satisfaction and retention.

As nearly all of Texas' rural lands are privately owned, landowner associations for the management of white-tailed deer and ground-water have become increasingly popular. Deer are a common-pool resource with transboundary characteristics, requiring landowner cooperation for effective management. Ground-water reserves are economically important to landowners, but are governed by the "rule of capture" whereby property rights are not defined.

Montados are silvo-pastoral systems, typical of the western Mediterranean Basin. When well managed, these ecosystems provide relevant ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation. In the northern part of the Mediterranean Basin, cork oak areas are mainly privately owned and a source of income to landowners, chiefly through cork and livestock production. Sustainable use is essential to maintain the ecological sustainability and socio-economic viability of these ecosystems.

A survey of landowners assessed the feasibility of long-term land conservation agreements for water resource protection. Such a private conservation tool is yet to be established in the UK, but innovation by an environmental charity seeks to mitigate the impacts of diffuse pollution from agriculture on water quality. Under the agreements a one-off payment would be made for agreed restrictions on use of targeted areas of farmland.

Threats to riverine landscapes are often the result of system‐wide river management policy, located far from where the threats appear, or both. As a result, the rationale for land protection to achieve floodplain conservation and restoration has shifted to require that lands must also have multiple and systemic threat abatement benefits. The Mississippi River Flood of 2011 highlighted the need for increased floodplain complexes along the Mississippi River to provide both systemic threat abatement and conservation benefits.