Global cropland expansion over the last century caused widespread habitat loss and degradation. Establishment of protected areas aims to counteract the loss of habitats and to slow species ...extinctions. However, many protected areas also include high levels of habitat disturbance and conversion for uses such as cropland. Understanding where and why this occurs may realign conservation priorities and inform protected area policy in light of competing priorities such as food security. Here, we use our global synthesis cropland dataset to quantify cropland in protected areas globally and assess their relationship to conservation aims and socio-environmental context. We estimate that cropland occupies 1.4 million km
or 6% of global protected area. Cropland occurs across all protected area management types, with 22% occurring in strictly protected areas. Cropland inside protected areas is more prevalent in countries with higher population density, lower income inequality, and with higher agricultural suitability of protected lands. While this phenomenon is dominant in midnorthern latitudes, areas of cropland in protected areas of the tropics and subtropics may present greater trade-offs due to higher levels of both biodiversity and food insecurity. Although area-based targets are prominent in biodiversity goal-setting, our results show that they can mask persistent anthropogenic land uses detrimental to native ecosystem conservation. To ensure the long-term efficacy of protected areas, post-2020 goal setting must link aims for biodiversity and human health and improve monitoring of conservation outcomes in cropland-impacted protected areas.
Many conservation organizations use spatial prioritization to help identify locations in which to work. Increasingly, prioritizations seek to account for spatial heterogeneity in the costs of ...conservation, motivated in part by claims of large efficiency savings when these costs are included. I critically review the cost estimates on which such claims are based, focusing on acquisition and management costs associated with terrestrial protected areas. If researchers are to evaluate how including costs affects conservation planning outcomes, estimation methods need to preserve the covariation between and relative variation within costs and benefits of conservation activities. However, widely used methods for estimating costs and incorporating them into prioritizations may not meet these standards. For example, among relevant studies, there is surprisingly little attention given to the costs that conservation organizations actually face. Instead, there is a heavy reliance on untested proxies for conservation costs. Analytical shortcuts are also common. Now that debate is moving beyond whether to account for costs in conservation planning, it is time to evaluate just how we can include them to greatest effect.
Should conservation organizations focus on protecting habitats that are at imminent risk of being converted but are expensive or more remote areas that are less immediately threatened but where a ...large amount of land can be set aside? Variants of this trade-off commonly arise in spatial planning. I used models of land-use change near a deforestation frontier to examine this trade-off. The optimal choice of where to protect was determined by how decisions taken today accounted for ecological benefits and economic costs of conservation actions that would occur sometime in the future. I used an ecological and economic discount rate to weight these benefits and costs. A large economic discount rate favored protecting more remote areas, whereas a large, positive ecological discount rate favored protecting habitat near the current deforestation frontier. The decision over where to protect was also affected by the influence economic factors had on landowners' decisions, the rate of technological change, and ecological heterogeneity of the landscape. How benefits and costs through time are accounted for warrants careful consideration when specifying conservation objectives. It may provide a niche axis along which conservation organizations differentiate themselves when competing for donor funding or other support. ¿Deberían las organizaciones de la conservación enfocarse en proteger habitats que están en riesgo inminente de cambiar el uso de suelo pero que tienen un precio elevado o áreas más remotas con una amenaza menor, pero en donde se puede reservar una gran cantidad de suelo? Es común que las variantes de este intercambio surjan en la planeación espacial. Usé modelos de cambio en el uso de suelo cercano a fronteras de deforestación para examinar este intercambio. La opción óptima de en dónde proteger se determinó por cómo las decisiones que se toman hoy en día consideran los beneficios ecológicos y los costos económicos de las acciones de conservación que ocurrirían en algún momento del futuro. Usé una tasa de descuento ecológico y económico para sopesar estos costos y beneficios. Una tasa mayor de descuento económico favoreció la protección del habitat cercano a la frontera de deforestación actual. La decisión sobre en dónde proteger también se vio afectada por la influencia que los factores económicos tuvieron sobre las decisiones del propietario, la tasa de cambio tecnológico, y la heterogeneidad ecológica del paisaje. Cómo se consideran los beneficios y costos a lo largo del tiempo garantiza una consideración cuidadosa cuando se especifican los objetivos de conservación. Esto puede proporcionar un eje de nicho a lo largo del cual las organizaciones de la conservación puedan diferenciarse entre sí cuando compitan por el financiamiento de un donador o cualquier otro apoyo. 保护组织是应该重点保护那些面临即将被改变的风险、但保护成本很髙的生境，还是应该保护较为偏 远、不会马上受到威胁，但可以留住大片土地的地区？这种类型的利弊权衡是空间规划时常面临的问題。本研 究用森林采伐边界的土地利用变化模型来研究这ー权衡。保护地的最优选择取决于现在的决策如何将未来保护 行动的生态收益及经济成本纳入考虑。本研究利用生态和经济的折现率来衡量这些收益及成本。较高的经济折 现率有利于偏远地区的保护, 而较高的生态正折现率则是支持保护目前位于森林采伐前沿的生境。经济因素对 土地所有者的决策、技术革新的速度和景观的生态异质性的作用也会影响保护地的选择。在确定保护目标时， 需要仔细分析长期的收益和成本。对于保护组织来说，这为它们提供了争取捐赠资金或其它支持时彼此区分的 生态位轴。
Over half of the world's human population lives in cities, and for many, urban greenspaces are the only places where they encounter biodiversity. This is of particular concern because there is ...growing evidence that human well-being is enhanced by exposure to nature. However, the specific qualities of greenspaces that offer the greatest benefits remain poorly understood. One possibility is that humans respond positively to increased levels of biodiversity. Here, we demonstrate the lack of a consistent relationship between actual plant, butterfly, and bird species richness and the psychological well-being of urban greenspace visitors. Instead, well-being shows a positive relationship with the richness that the greenspace users perceived to be present. One plausible explanation for this discrepancy, which we investigate, is that people generally have poor biodiversity-identification skills. The apparent importance of perceived species richness and the mismatch between reality and perception pose a serious challenge for aligning conservation and human well-being agendas.
Ecological systems are dynamic and policies to manage them need to respond to that variation. However, policy adjustments will sometimes be costly, which means that fineâtuning a policy to track ...variability in the environment very tightly will only sometimes be worthwhile. We use a classic fisheries management problem, how to manage a stochastically varying population using annually varying quotas in order to maximize profit, to examine how costs of policy adjustment change optimal management recommendations. Costs of policy adjustment (changes in fishing quotas through time) could take different forms. For example, these costs may respond to the size of the change being implemented, or there could be a fixed cost any time a quota change is made. We show how different forms of policy costs have contrasting implications for optimal policies. Though it is frequently assumed that costs to adjusting policies will dampen variation in the policy, we show that certain cost structures can actually increase variation through time. We further show that failing to account for adjustment costs has a consistently worse economic impact than would assuming these costs are present when they are not.
1. An increasing number of studies are examining the distribution and congruence of ecosystem services, often with the goal of identifying areas that will provide multiple ecosystem service ' ...hotspots'. However, there is a paucity of data on most ecosystem services, so proxies (e. g. estimates of a service for a particular land cover type) are frequently used to map their distribution. To date, there has been little attempt to quantify the effects of using proxies on distribution maps of ecosystem services, despite the potentially large errors associated with such data sets. 2. Here, we provide the first study examining the effects of using proxies on ecosystem service maps and the degree of spatial congruence of these maps with primary data, using England as a case study. 3. We show that land cover based proxies provide a poor fit to primary data surfaces for biodiversity, recreation and carbon storage, and that correlations between ecosystem services change depending on whether primary or proxy data are used for the analyses. 4. The poor fit of proxies to primary data was also evident when we selected hotspots of single ecosystem services, and consistency between raw and modelled surfaces was extremely low when considering the locations that were coincident hotspots for multiple services. 5. Synthesis and applications. Proxies may be suitable for identifying broad-scale trends in ecosystem services, but even relatively good proxies are likely to be unsuitable for identifying hotspots or priority areas for multiple services.
Green spaces play a crucial role in supporting urban ecological and social systems, a fact recognised in public policy commitments in both the UK and Europe. The amount of provision, the distribution ...of green space and the ease of access to such spaces are key contributors to social and ecological function in urban environments. We measured distance along the transport network to public green space available to households in Sheffield, and compared this with the distribution of private garden space. In addition, we used a geodemographic database, Mosaic UK, to examine how access to green space varies across different sectors of society. Public green spaces are chronically underprovided relative to recommended targets. For example, 64% of Sheffield households fail to meet the recommendation of the regulatory agency English Nature (EN), that people should live no further than 300
m from their nearest green space. Moreover, this figure rises to 72% if we restrict attention to municipal parks recognised by the local council. There is an overall reduction in coverage by green space when moving from neighbourhoods where green space is primarily publicly provided to those where it is privately provided. While access to public green space varies significantly across different social groups, those enjoying the greatest access include more deprived groups and older people. This study highlights the need for additional green space to be created and existing green space to be protected in light of increasing development pressure.
Globally, much biodiversity is found on private land. Acting to conserve such biodiversity thus requires the design of policies which influence the decision-making of farmers and foresters. In this ...paper, we outline the economic characteristics of this problem, before reviewing a number of policy options, such as conservation auctions and conservation easements. We then discuss a number of policy design problems, such as the need for spatial coordination and the choice between paying for outcomes rather than actions, before summarizing what the evidence and theory developed to date tell us about those aspects of biodiversity policy design which need careful attention from policy-makers and environmental regulators.
Many decision-makers are looking to science to clarify how nature supports human well-being. Scientists’ responses have typically focused on empirical models of the provision of ecosystem services ...(ES) and resulting decision-support tools. Although such tools have captured some of the complexities of ES, they can be difficult to adapt to new situations. Globally useful tools that predict the provision of multiple ES under different decision scenarios have proven challenging to develop. Questions from decision-makers and limitations of existing decision-support tools indicate three crucial research frontiers for incorporating cutting-edge ES science into decision-support tools: (1) understanding the complex dynamics of ES in space and time, (2) linking ES provision to human well-being, and (3) determining the potential for technology to substitute for or enhance ES. We explore these frontiers in-depth, explaining why each is important and how existing knowledge at their cutting edges can be incorporated to improve ES decision-making tools.
To combat biodiversity loss, there is increasing interest in safeguarding habitat by expanding protected areas. Given limited resources in conservation, organizations must invest in places that will ...add the greatest amount of value in species protection. To determine the added conservation value of protection, one needs to consider the level of human disturbance in areas that would result if they were left unprotected. In recent years, data resources have become available that reveal the spatial heterogeneity in human disturbance over large spatial extents worldwide. We investigated how accounting for heterogeneity in future disturbance in unprotected areas affects prioritization of protected areas by determining the added value offered by protection of different areas. We applied a complementarity‐based framework for protected area prioritization to select protected areas in the coterminous United States under different assumptions about the heterogeneity of future disturbance in unprotected areas. Prioritizing protected areas while incorrectly assuming spatially homogeneous disturbance in unprotected areas, a common assumption, led to a loss of 76% of possible conservation gain for a given budget. The conservation return on investment from protecting candidate areas was positively correlated (0.44) to future human disturbance in that area if it was left unprotected. Our results show that the ability to identify cost‐effective protected area networks depends on how one accounts for the ecological contribution of private lands that remain unprotected.
Resumen
Existe un creciente interés por salvaguardar los hábitats mediante la expansión de áreas protegidas para combatir la pérdida de la biodiversidad. Debido a los recursos limitados para la conservación, las organizaciones deben invertir en localidades que adicionarán la mayor cantidad de valor a la protección de las especies. Para determinar el valor de conservación adicionado por la protección se necesita considerar el nivel de perturbación humana en las áreas que ocurriría si se les dejara desprotegidas. En años recientes, han quedado disponibles recursos informativos que revelan la heterogeneidad espacial en la perturbación humana a lo largo de grandes extensiones espaciales a nivel mundial. Investigamos cómo considerar esta heterogeneidad en las futuras perturbaciones de las áreas desprotegidas afecta la priorización de las áreas protegidas mediante la determinación del valor adicionado que ofrece la protección de diferentes áreas. Aplicamos un marco de trabajo basado en la complementariedad para la priorización de áreas protegidas para seleccionar estas áreas en los estados colindantes de los Estados Unidos bajo diferentes suposiciones sobre la heterogeneidad de las perturbaciones futuras en las áreas desprotegidas. La priorización de las áreas protegidas mientras se asumía incorrectamente la perturbación espacial homogénea en las áreas desprotegidas, una suposición común, resultó en una pérdida del 76% de la posible ganancia de conservación para un presupuesto dado. El rendimiento de la conservación en la inversión a partir de la protección de las áreas candidatas estuvo correlacionado positivamente (0.44) con las perturbaciones humanas en el futuro si el área permanece desprotegida. Nuestros resultados muestran que la capacidad de identificar las redes rentables de áreas protegidas depende de cómo se consideran las contribuciones ecológicas de las tierras privadas que permanecen desprotegidas.
在确定优先保护地时考虑土地保护附加价值的空间异质性
【摘要】 为了应对生物多样性的丧失, 人们越来越关注通过扩大保护地来保护生境。鉴于保护资源有限, 各组织必须投资于能够为物种保护带来最大价值的地区。为了确定保护的附加价值, 我们需要考虑如果不保护这些地区, 将会导致的人类干扰程度。近年来, 越来越多的数据资源揭示了全球大空间范围内人类干扰的空间异质性。我们研究了未受保护地区未来干扰的异质性如何通过决定不同地区的保护所提供的附加价值来影响优先保护地的选择。本研究应用基于互补性的保护地优先排序框架, 在对未受保护地区的未来干扰异质性的不同假设下, 确定了美国的保护地。在确定优先保护地时, 通常会错误地假设未受保护地区的干扰在空间上是均匀的, 这会导致在给定的预算下损失76%的潜在保护收益。如果不加保护, 候选保护地的投资回报与该地区未来的人类干扰呈正相关(0.44)。我们的结果表明, 确定具有成本效益的保护地网络的能力, 取决于如何说明未受保护的私人土地的生态贡献。【翻译:胡怡思;审校:聂永刚】
Article impact statement: Considering heterogeneity in the added conservation value offered by protecting private lands improves protected area prioritization.
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