Biodiversity worldwide has been declining rapidly in recent decades. Acquiring land for protection has been used as a main strategy to halt this decline. Conservation organizations commonly rely on spatial planning approaches to help identify priorities for land protection. These spatial planning approaches often assume that the overall amount of conservation funding is fixed, and that funds can be freely allocated across different candidate regions for protection. We examine these assumptions by exploring the relationship between philanthropic donations to support conservation and investments in land protection. We analyzed land protection efforts made by a conservation NGO in the US, The Nature Conservancy, and philanthropic giving to the organization. We examined possible two-way effects using a regression approach with instrumental variables. Our results indicate that investments in land acquisition may have an increasing effect on philanthropic donations at state level. However, we found only limited indications of an effect of philanthropic donations on the allocation of land acquisitions for conservation. Our findings show that the allocation of land acquisitions for conservation may affect future philanthropic donations to conservation organizations.

近几十年来，世界范围内的生物多样性正在迅速下降。征用保护土地已被用作遏制这种下降的主要战略。保护组织通常依靠空间规划方法来帮助确定土地保护的重点。这些空间规划方法通常假定保护资金的总金额是固定的，并且可以在不同的候选区域之间自由分配资金进行保护。我们通过探索慈善捐赠以支持保护和土地保护投资之间的关系来检验这些假设。我们分析了美国一个环境保护非政府组织，自然保护组织以及对该组织的慈善捐赠所做的土地保护工作。我们使用带有工具变量的回归方法研究了可能的双向影响。我们的结果表明，土地购置方面的投资可能对州一级的慈善捐赠产生越来越大的影响。但是，我们仅发现有限的迹象表明慈善捐赠对用于保护的土地购置分配有影响。我们的研究结果表明，用于保护的土地购置分配可能会影响将来向保护组织的慈善捐赠。