1. Private landowners own most of America’s wildlife habitat. Sixty percent of the U.S. is privately owned and also contains most of the land and water with the highest value for biodiversity.
2. America’s private working lands are especially important because they constitute 53 percent of the U.S., by far the largest portion of private lands: farms and ranches cover 914 million acres and forests cover 300 million acres.
3. Stewardship requires active, hands-on management. Research over the past decade reveals that as much as 84 percent of endangered species are conservation reliant, which means they will depend on conservation activities indefinitely, such as predator control, grazing, mowing, controlled burning and habitat creation.
4. Stewardship is an ongoing, constantly evolving process and takes years, if not decades, to show results.
5. A practice known as adaptive management is synonymous with sound stewardship because it must be flexible in order to respond to ever-changing, site-specific biophysical data and social information. Stewardship involves trade-offs and decisions often have unintended consequences, so it must be adaptable.
6. People are the key to effective stewardship. There is a false choice between stewardship and human activities.
7. Most importantly, stewardship at its essence is asocial process. It requires people taking actions and making decisions at all steps; defining the given issue to address, addressing the issue through a wide variety of management practices, deciding how and when to make tradeoffs between potential conflicts, and deciding when and for how long to implement management actions.
