FORT MYERS — A state agency wants to find out what opportunities are out there for conservation on privately held lands in Florida.
On the first afternoon Tuesday of a three-day meeting in Fort Myers, the board of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said it wants to look to the future for land conservation throughout the state.
“To the average person, government is regulation, regulation, stop, start, but our view is different,” FWC board Chairman Richard Corbett said. “We want to find out how we can step in to make the land better and lives better, and how we can all work together.”
Conservation Commission officials said 5.3 million of Florida’s 34.7 million acres is already developed or incorporated and another 10 million acres is in conservation, leaving 19.4 million acres of conservation opportunities on privately owned lands.
But if predictions come true that the state’s population could double in the next five decades, the agency thinks another 7 million acres (larger than Vermont) could be converted to urban use, further reducing conservation opportunities.
“Our mission is to identify and prioritize private land that serves as wildlife corridors in Southwest Florida,” said Luis Gonzalez of the Conservation Commission’s Division of Habitat and Species Conservation. “Here in Southwest Florida, our main focus is on wetland-reserve programs.”
Scott Sanders, a Conservation Commission section leader, said the agency is working with private landowners in a variety of ways to conserve Florida’s natural resources. Among those are providing conservation planning, offering incentives to conserve land and assisting with wildlife management.
Additionally, the Conservation Commission has its eye on 570,000 acres of privately owned land throughout the state for growth-management planning, he said.
“It’s all about building relationships with the landowners,” Sanders said. “We feel like we’re making strides, but we still have a long way to go.”
In an effort to get there, Sanders said the Conservation Commission is looking into a payment system for private landowners who provide wildlife habitats by virtue of how they use their land.
“The questions now are: How do we value that service, and how would we fund it?” he said.
During his presentation to the conservation board, Sanders said a University of Florida habitat survey found private landowners’ greatest concern is for white-tailed deer on their property, with 22 percent of respondents saying it was the species that interested them most.
Eighteen percent of respondents in the survey cited upland game birds as their biggest concern, while 4 percent cited endangered species.
“We find that when they’re doing good things for white-tailed deer, by and large they’re doing good things for other species as well,” Sanders said of landowners.
The Conservation Commission staff also is looking at conservation strategies used in other states.
Tuesday’s guest speaker was Jim Stone, a Montana cattle rancher who’s heavily involved in the Blackfoot River Challenge, a public-private partnership that’s designed to preserve the river.
“In 1992, the Blackfoot River was listed as one of the 10 most endangered rivers in the country,” Stone said. “Our challenge then and now was: How do we get people’s input, and how do we get people involved?”
The answer, Stone said, was to bring both private and public stakeholders to the table.
“We operate on the 80/20 rule,” he said. “We found that people can agree on about 80 percent of an issue, but it’s human nature to fight about the other 20 percent, so we decided to just get to work on the 80 percent first, without throwing away the 20 percent.”
Getting to that 20 percent takes a lot of patience, Stone cautioned.
“It takes years, but if you keep working on it, chipping away at it, you’ll get to it eventually,” he said. “And we found that we, as private landowners, need to take the lead.”
The Conservation Commission meeting continues Wednesday, with discussions that will include panther tracking and research initiatives.