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host of variables (including land size and location, and management technologies, etc.) affects how biologically valuable any parcel of land is. Thus, there may be a sharp contrast between the simplicity that is necessary to gain ready understand- ing and acceptance, and the reality that the biological values that must be quanti- fied are quite complex. A second potential stumbling block is uncertainty about whether there will in fact be a market for credits that has enough buyers willing to pay a sufficiently high price to induce landowners to earn credits by committing to particular land man- agement practices. This uncertainty has at least two sources: (1) the cost to a landowner of the practices that generate credits is unknown, and (2) enforcement of the Act may never be sufficiently aggressive to cause landowners to worry about compliance. Both these potential stumbling blocks might be lessened under the following approach. Landowners could be invited to enroll their lands in a program that required them to manage those lands in a particular way, in return for which they would receive payments or other forms of compensation. To design such a program, three tasks must be performed: 1. Lands eligible for enrollment must be identified. These could be all lands, non-federal lands, non-public lands, only parcels above a certain size, only forested parcels, only long-leaf dominated parcels, or other possibilities. 2. The management prescriptions applicable to enrolled lands must be identified. This could include rotation cycles, prescribed burns or other understory control requirements, pine straw harvest requirements, cavity augmentation, restrictions on removing old trees, reforestation require- ments, and anything else necessary to give a high degree of assurance that the lands will be managed to optimize their value for RCW conservation. 3. The compensation to the enrolled landowner must be identified. This could include direct annual payments from a trust fund (to which the state, FWS, Army, North Carolina Department of Transportation, or others might contribute, and to which landowners required to mitigate for ad- verse impacts to RCWs or their habitat might be required to pay), local or other tax relief, enhanced benefits under the Forest Stewardship or other similar programs, relief from liability for burning, assurances that enrolled landowners who carry out their enrollment obligations will not be pros- ecuted for takings of woodpeckers, and possibly other benefits. In concept, the above program resembles the "conservation reserve" and "wet- lands reserve" programs of the federal government in that landowners enrolling lands in those programs commit to certain land management practices and receive payments. It differs in that it envisions a package of benefits from diverse sources 2tt