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Increasingly, habitat restoration is taking place on private lands, as more landowners become interested in the loss of species diversity in their regions. Some landowners are aware that their land supports endemic plant species, and species that may be decreasing, and choose to manage their property to support these species in particular.

Private lands conservation of plants shares some goals with conservation on public lands, but has unique challenges and opportunities.

The private landowner does not have to get approval from a committee, a funding source, or anyone else to choose to conserve a plant species on her property. The landowner is free to consult any source of information about plants on the property, including the managers of public lands, academic experts, and state conservation agencies. The landowner is free to choose almost any method of management and conservation, to set up her own experiments and evaluate them. The landowner can exclude visitors that might take plant materials or damage them and need not justify this decision to a state agency, as public lands managers must often do. The landowner can propagate plants in an intensive way that is beyond the resources of any agency.

Where the landowner is knowledgeable about the plant community in question, and has considerable experience with it, this freedom to act autonomously and quickly can save otherwise disappearing species if the population on that land is large enough. Landowner experimentation has led to changes in management on public lands, when the landowner's results were superior, and has also spurred interest from other landowners. "Selah", a large ranch in central Texas, has become a byword for range management and restoration efforts on the Edwards Plateau. Other landowners, large and small, have experimented with methods of propagating plant species considered rare or difficult. The savvy landowner does not have to have a doctorate in restoration ecology to understand the principles and apply them.

But there are limitations which must be mentioned. A landowner may have an enthusiasm for a particular plant without understanding its ecological niche-what its needs are, what the community is in which that plant grows. Without a strong background-whether formally or informally obtained-a landowner may blithely destroy "competing" plants which the desired plant needs to have nearby, or treat it like a flower-garden plant and overload it with fertilizer and water. The landowner

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