Subdivision design and stewardship affect bird and mammal use of conservation developments

Developing effective tools for conservation on private lands is increasingly important for global biodiversity conservation; private lands are located in more productive and biologically diverse areas, and they face accelerated rates of land conversion. One strategy is conservation development (CD) subdivisions, which cluster houses in a small portion of a property and preserve the remaining land as protected open space. Despite widespread use, the characteristics that make CD more or less effective at achieving biodiversity conservation are not well understood. We investigated CD's ability to successfully protect animal populations by examining bird and mammal occurrences in 14 CD subdivisions and 4 undeveloped areas (range: 14-432 ha) in northern Colorado, USA. Using point count and camera trap data in an occupancy modeling framework, we evaluated the relative importance of 9 subdivision design factors (e.g., housing density, proportion of CD protected) and 14 stewardship factors (e.g...