Do working forest easements work for conservation?

Conservation easements are voluntary legal agreements designed to constrain land-use activities on private land to achieve conservation goals. Extensive public and private funding has been used to establish “working forest” conservation easements (WFCE) that aim to protect conservation values while maintaining commercial timber production. We use variation in the timing and location of easements to estimate the impacts of WFCEs in Maine from a 33-year time-series of forest loss and harvesting WFCEs had negligible impacts on an already low rate of forest loss. Compared to matched controls, easements decreased forest loss by 0.0004% yr-1, or the equivalent of 3ha yr-1 when scaled to total conserved area. In contrast, WFCEs increased the rate of harvesting by 0.37% yr-1, or 2,935ha yr-1 when scaled to the 839,000 ha of conserved area. However, more recently established easements contained stricter restrictions on harvest practices and stricter easements reduced harvest by 0.62% yr-1. Our results suggest that future easements could be more effective if they were targeted to higher risk of loss areas and included additional provisions for harvest restrictions and monitoring.