Forest certification is a means by which sustainable forest management has been recognized and promoted; however, certifications have generally been conducted on a landowner-by-landowner basis, without a strategy to ensure that certification is an effective conservation tool at the landscape level. The Rainforest Alliance’s LINC Forest Partnership is developing such a strategy by identifying forested areas of high conservation relevance, and prioritizing a subset of those forests for certification promotion and outreach. Prioritization is based on the potential for certification to complement existing conservation initiatives such as forest reserves, protected areas, and conservation easements, as well as important socio-economic data, such as the location of chain-of-custody certified operations, and ownership type. By identifying and promoting certification on these “keystone ownerships”, our goal is to create conservation benefits that exceed the individual benefits of reserves and certified forests alone. This approach is currently being developed and piloted in the US Northeast and Southern Appalachians. In the presentation I will describe the prioritization process undertaken, lessons learned, and the potential applicability of this approach to other regions.