There has been an increasingly prevalent message that data regarding costs must be included in conservation planning activities to make cost-efficient decisions. Despite the growing acceptance that ...socioeconomic context is critical to conservation success, the approaches to embedded economic and financial considerations into planning have not significantly evolved. Inappropriate cost data is frequently included in decisions, with the potential of compromising biodiversity and social outcomes. For each conservation planning step, this essay details common mistakes made when considering costs, proposing solutions to enable conservation managers to know when and how to include costs. Appropriate use of high-quality cost data obtained at the right scale will improve decision-making and ultimately avoid costly mistakes.
Systematic conservation planning is considered best practice for identifying priority areas, but applications remain limited where biodiversity data are insufficient. In a recent article, Chowdhury ...et al. tap into citizen scientists via Facebook to address this gap in Bangladesh. Here, I discuss the importance of their demonstrated pipeline, from data acquisition to conservation prioritisation.
With the high rate of ecosystem change, effective systematic conservation planning must account for ongoing and imminent threats to biodiversity to ensure its persistence. Accordingly, guidance on ...appropriate conservation actions in the face of climate change has been accumulating. We review this guidance and bring together the key recommendations needed to successfully account for climate change impacts, relevant to the scale at which natural resource management is carried out. We discuss how the traditional conservation tools of protection and restoration need to be adjusted to be effective in the face of climate change. We highlight the conservation innovations such as moveable and temporary reserves, and Targeted Gene Flow. We build on recent work to provide critical advice for considering climate change in conservation planning. In particular, we discuss how stating explicit objectives related to climate change adaptation, quantifying uncertainty, and exploring trade-offs will better place conservation plans to meet objectives for multiple goals such as protection of species, ecosystems, geophysical diversity and ecological processes.
Mental models for conservation research and practice Moon, Katie; Guerrero, Angela M.; Adams, Vanessa. M. ...
Conservation letters,
May/June 2019, 2019-05-00, 20190501, 2019-05-01, Volume:
12, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Conservation practice requires an understanding of complex social‐ecological processes of a system and the different meanings and values that people attach to them. Mental models research offers a ...suite of methods that can be used to reveal these understandings and how they might affect conservation outcomes. Mental models are representations in people's minds of how parts of the world work. We seek to demonstrate their value to conservation and assist practitioners and researchers in navigating the choices of methods available to elicit them. We begin by explaining some of the dominant applications of mental models in conservation: revealing individual assumptions about a system, developing a stakeholder‐based model of the system, and creating a shared pathway to conservation. We then provide a framework to “walk through” the stepwise decisions in mental models research, with a focus on diagram‐based methods. Finally, we discuss some of the limitations of mental models research and application that are important to consider. This work extends the use of mental models research in improving our ability to understand social‐ecological systems, creating a powerful set of tools to inform and shape conservation initiatives.
Aim
To quantify the impact of the 2019–2020 megafires on Australian plant diversity by assessing burnt area across 26,062 species ranges and the effects of fire history on recovery potential. ...Further, to exemplify a strategic approach to prioritizing plant species affected by fire for recovery actions and conservation planning at a national scale.
Location
Australia.
Methods
We combine data on geographic range, fire extent, response traits and fire history to assess the proportion of species ranges burnt in both the 2019–2020 fires and the past.
Results
Across Australia, suitable habitat for 69% of all plant species was burnt (17,197 species) by the 2019–2020 fires and herbarium specimens confirm the presence of 9,092 of these species across the fire extent since 1950. Burnt ranges include those of 587 plants listed as threatened under national legislation (44% of Australia's threatened plants). A total of 3,998 of the 17,197 fire‐affected species are known to resprout after fire, but at least 2,928 must complete their entire life cycle—from germinant to reproducing adult—prior to subsequent fires, as they are killed by fire. Data on previous fires show that, for 257 species, the historical intervals between fire events across their range are likely too short to allow regeneration. For a further 411 species, future fires during recovery will increase extinction risk as current populations are dominated by immature individuals.
Main conclusion
Many Australian plant species have strategies to persist under certain fire regimes, and will recover given time, suitable conditions and low exposure to threats. However, short fire intervals both before and after the 2019–2020 fire season pose a serious risk to the recovery of at least 595 species. Persistent knowledge gaps about species fire response and post‐fire population persistence threaten the effective long‐term management of Australian vegetation in an increasingly pyric world.
Species that cannot adapt or keep pace with a changing climate are likely to need human intervention to shift to more suitable climates. While hundreds of articles mention using translocation as a ...climate‐change adaptation tool, in practice, assisted migration as a conservation action remains rare, especially for animals. This is likely due to concern over introducing species to places where they may become invasive. However, there are other barriers to consider, such as time‐frame mismatch, sociopolitical, knowledge and uncertainty barriers to conservationists adopting assisted migration as a go‐to strategy. We recommend the following to advance assisted migration as a conservation tool: attempt assisted migrations at small scales, translocate species with little invasion risk, adopt robust monitoring protocols that trigger an active response, and promote political and public support.
Importancia de las Reubicaciones de Especies bajo el Cambio Climático Acelerado
Resumen
Las especies que no pueden adaptarse o mantener el ritmo del cambio climático probablemente requieran de la intervención humana para mudarse a climas más adecuados. Mientras que cientos de artículos mencionan el uso de las reubicaciones como una herramienta de adaptación al cambio climático, en la práctica, la migración asistida todavía es rara como una acción de conservación, especialmente para animales. Lo anterior probablemente se debe a la preocupación que existe por la introducción de especies a sitios en los que podrían volverse invasoras. Sin embargo, existen otras barreras que deberían considerarse, como aquellas ocasionadas por el desfase en el marco temporal, cuestiones sociopolíticas, de conocimiento o de incertidumbre para los conservacionistas que adoptan a la migración asistida como la estrategia de cajón. Recomendamos lo siguiente para que la migración asistida avance como herramienta de conservación: intentar realizar migraciones asistidas a pequeñas escalas, reubicar especies con poco riesgo de invasión, adoptar protocolos de monitoreo robustos que generen una respuesta activa y promover el apoyo público y político.
摘要
不能适应或跟上气候变化的物种可能需要人类干预以迁移到气候更适宜的地区。虽然已有数百篇文献提到利用辅助迁移作为物种适应气候变化的工具, 但在实践中, 这样的保护行动仍然很少, 特别是对动物来说。这可能是因为人们担心将物种引入新环境可能导致物种的入侵扩散。然而, 保护主义者采用辅助迁移作为首选策略还面临着其它阻碍, 如时限不匹配, 社会政治因素, 知识不足以及不确定性等。为了推动辅助迁移在保护中的应用, 我们建议先尝试小尺度的辅助迁移, 对入侵风险低的物种进行迁移, 采用能引发有效反应的稳健监测方案, 以及加大政治及公众的支持。 【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
This paper relates evidence from the COVID‐19 pandemic to the concept of pandemic refuges, as developed in literature on global catastrophic risk. In this literature, a refuge is a place or facility ...designed to keep a portion of the population alive during extreme global catastrophes. COVID‐19 is not the most extreme pandemic scenario, but it is nonetheless a very severe global event, and it therefore provides an important source of evidence. Through the first 2 years of the COVID‐19 pandemic, several political jurisdictions have achieved low spread of COVID‐19 via isolation from the rest of the world and can therefore classify as pandemic refuges. Their suppression and elimination of COVID‐19 demonstrates the viability of pandemic refuges as a risk management measure. Whereas prior research emphasizes island nations as pandemic refuges, this paper uses case studies of China and Western Australia to show that other types of jurisdictions can also successfully function as pandemic refuges. The paper also refines the concept of pandemic refuges and discusses implications for future pandemics.
•We assess compatibilities, conflicts and potential trade-offs between public land-use preferences and tenure policies.•The type of constraint affects zone configuration only at low to medium target ...level and does not change zone distributions at high target level.•Compatible land-use preferences with tenure policies can determine future landscape arrangements regardless of current land-use areas.•Findings highlight the importance of including preference data in planning process, particularly when aiming to meet low to medium target objectives.
Allocating multiple land-uses in the landscape while accommodating social preferences is an overarching goal of an effective land-use plan. While there is momentum to include social preferences into planning, successful integration of preferences for multiple objectives, such as development and conservation, have been limited to date. Our aim was to examine how land-use designations can be modified to reduce conflict among multiple social preferences in a regional study area in Baffle Basin, Queensland state, Australia. We collected empirical data on spatially-explicit preferences for land-uses using Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) and integrated them into land-use planning. We used the systematic conservation planning tool Marxan with Zones to optimize zone allocations in a way that met objectives for these land-use preferences while minimizing conflicts as much as possible. We considered four scenarios that ranged from no constraints (assuming we could zone the region without consideration of existing land tenures or policies) through to full constraints (including preference against use, existing land-use, and land tenure types). We considered a full range of targets (10%–90%) to explore the extent to which targets influence the ability to align zones with preferences or result in possible conflicts. In the fully allocated outputs (90% targets), we found spatial land-use zonings were similar across scenarios; however for lower targets there were spatial variations in priority areas depending on the constraints included. In terms of meeting objectives, all targets could be met across scenarios up to 50% targets and tourism and residential preferences were the first to have missed targets and displayed the largest shortfalls for higher targets. Suggesting that for targets higher than 50% trade-offs in land-uses and social preferences will be made. The findings of this study can inform future landscape arrangements in terms of the influence of social preferences on zone allocations in the context of current and future use policies in order to reduce potential conflicts and make more socially acceptable land-use decisions.
Protected areas aim to conserve nature, ecosystem services, and cultural values; however, they have variable success in doing so under high development pressure. Southeast Asian protected areas faced ...the highest level of human pressure at the turn of the twenty-first century. To estimate their effectiveness in conserving forest cover and forest carbon stocks for 2000-2018, we used statistical matching methods to control for the non-random location of protected areas, to compare protection against a matched counterfactual. We found Southeast Asian protected areas had three times less forest cover loss than similar landscapes without protection. Protected areas that had completed management reporting using the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) conserved significantly more forest cover and forest carbon stocks than those that had not. Management scores were positively associated with the level of carbon emissions avoided, but not the level of forest cover loss avoided. Our study is the first to find that METT scores could predict the level of carbon emissions avoided in protected areas. Given that only 11% of protected areas in Southeast Asia had completed METT surveys, our results illustrate the need to scale-up protected area management effectiveness reporting programs to improve their effectiveness for conserving forests, and for storing and sequestering carbon.
A rise in qualitative social science manuscripts published in ecology and conservation journals speaks to the growing awareness of the importance of the human dimension in maintaining and improving ...Earth’s ecosystems. Given the rise in the quantity of qualitative social science research published in ecology and conservation journals, it is worthwhile quantifying the extent to which this research is meeting established criteria for research design, conduct, and interpretation. Through a comprehensive review of this literature, we aimed to gather and assess data on the nature and extent of information presented on research design published qualitative research articles, which could be used to judge research quality. Our review was based on 146 studies from across nine ecology and conservation journals. We reviewed and summarized elements of quality that could be used by reviewers and readers to evaluate qualitative research (dependability, credibility, confirmability, and transferability); assessed the prevalence of these elements in research published in ecology and conservation journals; and explored the implications of sound qualitative research reporting for applying research findings. We found that dependability and credibility were reasonably well reported, albeit poorly evolved in relation to critical aspects of qualitative social science such as methodology and triangulation, including reflexivity. Confirmability was, on average, inadequately accounted for, particularly with respect to researchers’ ontology, epistemology, or philosophical perspective and their choice of methodology. Transferability was often poorly developed in terms of triangulation methods and the suitability of the sample for answering the research question/s. Based on these findings, we provide a guideline that may be used to evaluate qualitative research presented in ecology and conservation journals to help secure the role of qualitative research and its application to decision making.
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