Abstract
The practices that the private sector devotes to direct land conservation by acquiring the powers of managing or monitoring land have become a strategy that drawn more and more attention. There are several legal instruments that could be used to perform this strategy under current law, such as acquiring land by purchase, gift, or in trust. However, using those instruments often encounters difficulties in practice. Therefore, seeking innovative legal instruments to prompt private land conservation becomes an important issue.This study argues that conservation easement in the United States has relative institutional merits, including low costs for conservation groups and high acceptability for land owners, in comparison to existing legal instruments in Taiwan and is a valuable mechanism to be adopted.