More than a century after Teddy Roosevelt used his authority as president to protect wildlife and public lands, our country’s conservation efforts are met with new challenges. Landscape fragmentation – the breakup of large areas of natural land cover into smaller, disconnected parcels via farming, housing development, and other land use – makes protection more difficult. Regulators must work across multiple jurisdictions and boundaries, appeasing many more stakeholders.

James Levitt, an expert on land conservation and climate change, examines these modern-day large landscape issues, including their impact in the Great Plains and places such as Kansas’ and Oklahoma’s Flint Hills. At stake are nature’s ability to withstand climate change, species survival, and the quality of human life.

Levitt is director of The Program on Conservation Innovation at Harvard Forest, a 3,000-acre ecological research area owned and managed by Harvard University in central Massachusetts. He also is associate director for land conservation at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and holds ongoing fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School and Highstead, a nonprofit working to advance land conservation in New England.

His presentation is co-presented by The Nature Conservancy.