The conservation goal of The Nature Conservancy, as stated in Conservation by Design: A Framework for Mission Success (The Nature Conservancy 1996a) is “the long-term survival of all viable native species and community types through the design and conservation of portfolios of sites within ecoregions.” This statement represents the first time the Conservancy made explicit the geographic framework—ecoregions—which would enable the overall mission of the organization to be implemented in ecologically meaningful units of the earth’s surface. Within each ecoregion, the specific species and natural communities that would become the focus of conservation planning and implementation—the conservation targets—could be considered in the context of the ecological patterns and processes that helped to shape their distribution, abundance, composition, structure, and life history.

To support this approach to conservation, the Conservancy developed guidelines that laid out the initial framework of ecoregions, adopted from the work of Robert G. Bailey of the U.S. Forest Service for the continental US (Bailey 1994), and the process to be followed in planning for ecoregional conservation (Designing a Geography of Hope, The Nature Conservancy 1996b). In the Continental US, 64 ecoregions have been identified.

For strategic purposes, The Conservancy has made the development of plans for these ecoregions a high priority. Planning for the Interior Low Plateau was initiated in mid-1998 and was completed over a period of roughly two and a half years, simultaneously with several other ecoregional plans in the Midwest region. Many of the partners involved in this planning process were also involved in planning for other ecoregions. Involvement in several plans enhanced the familiarity of participants with the concepts and approaches being used and in all probability increased the efficiency of the process. At the same time, some partners were perhaps asked to do too much and may have experienced some burnout from early plans that carried over into later plans. Overall, the overlap among planning processes probably resulted in a net benefit and improvement of plans, especially in learning ways to streamline the process.