Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a critical defense against biodiversity loss in the world's oceans, but to realize near‐term conservation benefits, they must be established where major threats to ...biodiversity occur and can be mitigated. We quantified the degree to which MPA establishment has targeted stoppable threats (i.e., threats that can be abated through effectively managed MPAs alone) by combining spatially explicit marine biodiversity threat data in 2008 and 2013 and information on the location and potential of MPAs to halt threats. We calculated an impact metric to determine whether countries are protecting proportionally more high‐ or low‐threat ecoregions and compared observed values with random protected‐area allocation. We found that protection covered <2% of ecoregions in national waters with high levels of abatable threat in 2013, which is ∼59% less protection in high‐threat areas than if MPAs had been placed randomly. Relatively low‐threat ecoregions had 6.3 times more strict protection (International Union for Conservation of Nature categories I–II) than high‐threat ecoregions. Thirty‐one ecoregions had high levels of stoppable threat but very low protection, which presents opportunities for MPAs to yield more significant near‐term conservation benefits. The extent of the global MPA estate has increased, but the establishment of MPAs where they can reduce threats that are driving biodiversity loss is now urgently needed.
Sesgos de Cuantificación en la Ubicación de Áreas Marinas Protegidas en Relación con las Amenazas Abatibles a la Biodiversidad
Resumen
Las áreas marinas protegidas (MPAs, en inglés) son un sistema de defensa crítica contra la pérdida de biodiversidad en los océanos del mundo, pero para hacer realidad los beneficios de conservación de corto plazo, estas áreas deben establecerse en donde ocurren la mayoría de las amenazas para la biodiversidad y en donde puedan mitigarse. Cuantificamos el grado al cual la fundación de MPAs se ha enfocado en amenazas abatibles (es decir, amenazas que pueden abatirse solamente por medio de MPAs manejadas efectivamente) al combinar los datos de amenazas para la biodiversidad marina espacialmente explícita en 2008 y en 2013 y la información sobre la ubicación y el potencial que tienen las MPAs para detener las amenazas. Calculamos una medida de impacto para determinar si los países están protegiendo proporcionalmente más ecoregiones de alta o baja amenaza y comparamos los valores observados con las áreas protegidas asignadas al azar. Descubrimos que la protección cubría <2% de las ecoregiones en aguas nacionales con niveles altos de amenazas abatibles en 2013, lo cual es ∼59% menos protección en las áreas de alta amenaza que si las MPAs se hubieran ubicado al azar. Las ecoregiones con una baja amenaza relativa tuvieron 6.3 veces más protección estricta (categorías I‐II de la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza) que las ecoregiones con amenaza alta. Treinta y un ecoregiones tuvieron niveles altos de amenazas abatibles pero muy baja protección, lo cual representa oportunidades para que las MPAs tengan más beneficios significativos a corto plazo. La extensión del conjunto global de MPAs ha incrementado, pero la fundación de MPAs en lugares donde pueden reducir laamenazas que causan la pérdida de biodiversidad es una necesidad urgente en día.
摘要
海洋保护区建立是防止地球海洋生物多样性丧失的一项重要措施， 但要达到短期的保护成效， 必须在生物多样性面临严重威胁且威胁可被减轻的地区建立保护区。结合 2008 年和 2013 年海洋生物多样性威胁的空间数据及海洋保护区的位置和减缓威胁的潜力等信息， 我们量化分析了海洋保护区的建立对于减缓威胁的效果。我们用一个影响指标来计算各个国家保护的， 受高水平和低水平威胁的生态区比例大小， 并将观测值与随机设置保护区的情况进行比较。我们发现， 2013 年, 可控威胁水平较高的国家海域中仅有低于 <2% 的生态区得到保护， 这比随机设置海洋保护区所保护的受高威胁地区少了约 59% 。受相对低威胁的生态区比受高威胁生态区得到的严格保护 （世界自然保护联盟 I‐II 类标准） 高 6.3 倍。有三十一个生态区存在高水平的可控威胁， 但得到保护却很少， 这为海洋保护区在短期内取得更显著的保护成效带来了机会。目前， 全球海洋保护区的范围正在扩大， 但仍迫切需要在导致生物多样性下降的， 威胁可以得到有效减缓的地区建立保护区。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
Article impact statement: Strategic guidelines and better evaluation metrics are needed to correct biases in marine protection relative to levels of stoppable threat.
Conservation organizations have increasingly raised concerns about escalating rates of illegal hunting and trade in wildlife. Previous studies have concluded that people hunt illegally because they ...are financially poor or lack alternative livelihood strategies. However, there has been little attempt to develop a richer understanding of the motivations behind contemporary illegal wildlife hunting. As a first step, we reviewed the academic and policy literatures on poaching and illegal wildlife use and considered the meanings of poverty and the relative importance of structure and individual agency. We placed motivations for illegal wildlife hunting within the context of the complex history of how wildlife laws were initially designed and enforced to indicate how hunting practices by specific communities were criminalized. We also considered the nature of poverty and the reasons for economic deprivation in particular communities to indicate how particular understandings of poverty as material deprivation ultimately shape approaches to illegal wildlife hunting. We found there is a need for a much better understanding of what poverty is and what motivates people to hunt illegally.
Plantations are established for a variety of reasons including wood production, soil and water conservation, and more recently, carbon sequestration. The effect of this growing land-use change on ...biodiversity, however, is poorly understood and considerable debate exists as to whether plantations are ‘green deserts' or valuable habitat for indigenous flora and fauna. This paper synthesizes peer-reviewed articles that provide quantitative data on plant species richness in plantations and paired land uses, most often representative of pre-plantation land cover. The results of this synthesis suggest that the value of plantations for biodiversity varies considerably depending on whether the original land cover is grassland, shrubland, primary forest, secondary forest, or degraded or exotic pasture, and whether native or exotic tree species are planted. The results of this study suggest that plantations are most likely to contribute to biodiversity when established on degraded lands rather than replacing natural ecosystems, such as forests, grasslands, and shrublands, and when indigenous tree species are used rather than exotic species. These findings can help guide afforestation and reforestation programs, including those aimed at increasing terrestrial carbon sequestration.
The full or partial purchase of land has become a cornerstone of efforts to conserve biodiversity in countries with strong private property rights. Methods used to target areas for acquisition ...typically ignore land market dynamics. We show how conservation purchases affect land prices and generate feedbacks that can undermine conservation goals, either by displacing development toward biologically valuable areas or by accelerating its pace. The impact of these market feedbacks on the effectiveness of conservation depends on the ecological value of land outside nature reserves. Traditional, noneconomic approaches to site prioritization should perform adequately in places where land outside reserves supports little biodiversity. However, these approaches will perform poorly in locations where the countryside surrounding reserves is important for species' persistence. Conservation investments can sometimes even be counterproductive, condemning more species than they save. Conservation is most likely to be compromised in the absence of accurate information on species distributions, which provides a strong argument for improving inventories of biodiversity. Accounting for land market dynamics in conservation planning is crucial for making smart investment decisions.
There is an urgent need to improve the evaluation of conservation interventions. This requires specifying an objective and a frame of reference from which to measure performance. Reference frames can ...be baselines (i.e., known biodiversity at a fixed point in history) or counterfactuals (i.e., a scenario that would have occurred without the intervention). Biodiversity offsets are interventions with the objective of no net loss of biodiversity (NNL). We used biodiversity offsets to analyze the effects of the choice of reference frame on whether interventions met stated objectives. We developed 2 models to investigate the implications of setting different frames of reference in regions subject to various biodiversity trends and anthropogenic impacts. First, a general analytic model evaluated offsets against a range of baseline and counterfactual specifications. Second, a simulation model then replicated these results with a complex real world case study: native grassland offsets in Melbourne, Australia. Both models showed that achieving NNL depended upon the interaction between reference frame and background biodiversity trends. With a baseline, offsets were less likely to achieve NNL where biodiversity was decreasing than where biodiversity was stable or increasing. With a no‐development counterfactual, however, NNL was achievable only where biodiversity was declining. Otherwise, preventing development was better for biodiversity. Uncertainty about compliance was a stronger determinant of success than uncertainty in underlying biodiversity trends. When only development and offset locations were considered, offsets sometimes resulted in NNL, but not across an entire region. Choice of reference frame determined feasibility and effort required to attain objectives when designing and evaluating biodiversity offset schemes. We argue the choice is thus of fundamental importance for conservation policy. Our results shed light on situations in which biodiversity offsets may be an inappropriate policy instrument Importancia de la Especificación de Línea de Base en la Evaluación de Intervenciones de Conservación y la Obtención de Ninguna Pérdida Neta de la Biodiversidad
Effective conservation and restoration of estuarine wetlands require accurate maps of their historical and current extent, as well as estimated losses of these valued habitats. Existing coast-wide ...tidal wetland mapping does not explicitly map historical tidal wetlands that are now disconnected from the tides, which represent restoration opportunities; nor does it use water level models or high-resolution elevation data (e.g. lidar) to accurately identify current tidal wetlands. To better inform estuarine conservation and restoration, we generated new maps of current and historical tidal wetlands for the entire contiguous U.S. West Coast (Washington, Oregon, and California). The new maps are based on an Elevation-Based Estuary Extent Model (EBEEM) that combines lidar digital elevation models (DEMs) and water level models to establish the maximum historical extent of tidal wetlands, representing a major step forward in mapping accuracy for restoration planning and analysis of wetland loss. Building from this new base, we also developed an indirect method for mapping tidal wetland losses, and created maps of these losses for 55 estuaries on the West Coast (representing about 97% of historical West Coast vegetated tidal wetland area). Based on these new maps, we estimated that total historical estuary area for the West Coast is approximately 735,000 hectares (including vegetated and nonvegetated areas), and that about 85% of vegetated tidal wetlands have been lost from West Coast estuaries. Losses were highest for major river deltas. The new maps will help interested groups improve action plans for estuarine wetland habitat restoration and conservation, and will also provide a better baseline for understanding and predicting future changes with projected sea level rise.
Editorial Kemp, Jonathan
Journal of the Institute of Conservation,
10/2019, Letnik:
42, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Ink bleeds and brown stains on paper can present pareidolia—where a vague shape is interpreted as something already known such as seeing a rabbit on the moon. All these articles centre in some way on ...perception and judgement and go to underline how conservation is arguably a more impressionistic pattern-led discipline than its axiomatic foundations might otherwise suggest.
Aim: Tracking the dispersal patterns and habitat use of migratory species is necessary to delineate optimal areas for protection, with large sample sizes being more representative of the population. ...Here, we examine the dispersal patterns of a key Mediterranean loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) breeding population to identify priority foraging sites for protection. Location: Zakynthos Island, Greece and the wider Mediterranean. Method: We examined the dispersal patterns and foraging sites of 75 adult loggerheads (n = 38 males and 37 females) tracked from the breeding area of Zakynthos Island (Greece) from 2004 to 2011. We then combined our data with published sea turtle literature to identify key foraging sites for protection. Results: While both males and females exhibited similar dispersal patterns, about 25% males remained < 100 km of Zakynthos, whereas all females (except one) migrated > 200 km. Integration of our data with the wider literature isolated 10 core sites in proximity to existing protected areas, which could potentially protect 64% of the Zakynthos population, while five sites support individuals from at least 10 other loggerhead breeding populations. Main conclusions: Due to the widespread availability of neritic foraging grounds across the Mediterranean, sea turtles from Zakynthos exhibit disparate dispersal patterns. However, protecting only a few objectively defined important sites can encompass a large proportion of the foraging areas used and hence have considerable conservation benefit.
•We experimentally tested the role that urban biodiversity plays in people’s life.•Plant, bird and pollinator diversity was significantly increased in public gardens.•Visitors expressed high interest ...in biodiversity and related it to their garden wellbeing.•But, visitors did not notice the changes we introduced and underestimated species diversity.•The people-biodiversity relationship is not as straightforward as commonly argued.
Urbanization is presenting a growing problem for biodiversity conservation, notably by increasingly isolating over half of the world’s population from the experience of nature. This separation of people from nature is an important environmental issue, as it could fundamentally influence the way people value nature and their willingness to conserve it. Here we provide the first experimental study that jointly explores how urban biodiversity can be enhanced and how these changes may influence some aspects of people–biodiversity interactions.
We significantly increased the diversity of flowers, birds and pollinators in small public gardens (Paris, France) by providing additional resources (i.e., planting flower-meadows and placing nesting-boxes). Semi-structured interviews were conducted in situ with 1116 regular garden users before and after the manipulation. Close-ended questionnaires were completed exploring the respondents’ biodiversity perception and their sensitivity to the changes in biodiversity. Our results highlight a people–biodiversity paradox between people’s perceptions and biodiversity awareness. Respondents expressed a strong preference for a rich diversity of species (excluding insects) and related this diversity to their well-being in the gardens. However, they did not notice the diversity of species. Respondents underestimated species richness and only noticed the changes in native flower richness in those gardens where advertisement and public involvement were organized. More experimental interdisciplinary studies are needed to further explore the people–biodiversity interactions. This would help expose the role that urban biodiversity plays in people’s daily life and the importance of this interaction for raising public support for general conservation policies.
The concept of metacommunity (i.e., a set of local communities linked by dispersal) has gained great popularity among community ecologists. However, metacommunity research mostly addresses questions ...on spatial patterns of biodiversity at the regional scale, whereas conservation planning requires quantifying temporal variation in those metacommunities and the contributions that individual (local) sites make to regional dynamics. We propose that recent advances in diversity-partitioning methods may allow for a better understanding of metacommunity dynamics and the identification of keystone sites. We used time series of the 2 components of beta diversity (richness and replacement) and the contributions of local sites to these components to examine which sites controlled source-sink dynamics in a highly dynamic model system (an intermittent river). The relative importance of the richness and replacement components of beta diversity fluctuated over time, and sample aggregation led to underestimation of beta diversity by up to 35%. Our literature review revealed that research on intermittent rivers would benefit greatlyfrom examination of betadiversity components over time. Adequately appraising spatiotemporal variability in community composition and identifying sites that are pivotal for maintaining biodiversity at the landscape scale are key needs for conservation prioritization and planning. Thus, our framework may be used to guide conservation actions in highly dynamic ecosystems when time-series data describing biodiversity across sites connected by dispersal are available. El concepto de metacomunidad (i. e., un conjunto de comunidades locales conectadas por dispersión) ha ganado gran popularidad entre los ecológos de comunidades. Sin embargo, la investigación sobre metacomunidades aborda mayormente preguntas sobre patrones espaciales de biodiversidad a escala regional, mientras que la planificación de la conservación requiere cuantificar la variación temporal en esas metacomunidades y las contribuciones de los sitios individuates a la dinámica regional Proponemos que los avances recientes en los métodos de partición de la diversidad permiten un mejor entendimiento de la dinámica de metacomunidades y la identificación de sitios clave. Utilizamos series temporales de los dos componentes de la beta diversidad (riqueza y reemplazo) y las contribuciones de los sitios locales a esos componentes para examinar cuáles sitios controlaban la dinámica fuente-sumidero en un sistema muy dinámico (un río intermitente). La importancia relativa de los componentes de riqueza y reemplazo de la beta diversidad fluctuaron a través del tiempo, y la agregación de muestras llevó a la subestimación de hasta el 35% de la beta diversidad. Nuestra revisión de literatura reveló que la investigación sobre ríos intermitentes se podría beneficiar del examen de los componentes de la beta diversidad a través del tiempo. La evaluación adecuada de la variabilidad espaciotemporal de la composicióny la identificación de sitios que son esenciales para el mantenimiento de la biodiversidad a escala de paisaje son necesidades claves para la priorización y planificación de la conservación. Por lo tanto, nuestro marco de referencia puede ser utilizado para guiar acetones de conservación en ecosistemas muy dinámicos cuando se dispone de datos de series temporales que describen biodiversidad en sitios conectados por dispersión.
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