Governments have agreed to expand the global protected area network from 13% to 17% of the world's land surface by 2020 (Aichi target 11) and to prevent the further loss of known threatened species ...(Aichi target 12). These targets are interdependent, as protected areas can stem biodiversity loss when strategically located and effectively managed. However, the global protected area estate is currently biased toward locations that are cheap to protect and away from important areas for biodiversity. Here we use data on the distribution of protected areas and threatened terrestrial birds, mammals, and amphibians to assess current and possible future coverage of these species under the convention. We discover that 17% of the 4,118 threatened vertebrates are not found in a single protected area and that fully 85% are not adequately covered (i.e., to a level consistent with their likely persistence). Using systematic conservation planning, we show that expanding protected areas to reach 17% coverage by protecting the cheapest land, even if ecoregionally representative, would increase the number of threatened vertebrates covered by only 6%. However, the nonlinear relationship between the cost of acquiring land and species coverage means that fivefold more threatened vertebrates could be adequately covered for only 1.5 times the cost of the cheapest solution, if cost efficiency and threatened vertebrates are both incorporated into protected area decision making. These results are robust to known errors in the vertebrate range maps. The Convention on Biological Diversity targets may stimulate major expansion of the global protected area estate. If this expansion is to secure a future for imperiled species, new protected areas must be sited more strategically than is presently the case.
Humans have altered terrestrial ecosystems for millennia 1, yet wilderness areas still remain as vital refugia where natural ecological and evolutionary processes operate with minimal human ...disturbance 2–4, underpinning key regional- and planetary-scale functions 5, 6. Despite the myriad values of wilderness areas—as critical strongholds for endangered biodiversity 7, for carbon storage and sequestration 8, for buffering and regulating local climates 9, and for supporting many of the world’s most politically and economically marginalized communities 10—they are almost entirely ignored in multilateral environmental agreements. This is because they are assumed to be relatively free from threatening processes and therefore are not a priority for conservation efforts 11, 12. Here we challenge this assertion using new comparable maps of global wilderness following methods established in the original “last of the wild” analysis 13 to examine the change in extent since the early 1990s. We demonstrate alarming losses comprising one-tenth (3.3 million km2) of global wilderness areas over the last two decades, particularly in the Amazon (30%) and central Africa (14%). We assess increases in the protection of wilderness over the same time frame and show that these efforts are failing to keep pace with the rate of wilderness loss, which is nearly double the rate of protection. Our findings underscore an immediate need for international policies to recognize the vital values of wilderness and the unprecedented threats they face and to underscore urgent large-scale, multifaceted actions needed to maintain them.
•Globally important wilderness areas are ignored in conservation policy•We reveal that extensive losses of wilderness have occurred in the last two decades•Efforts aimed at protecting wilderness areas are failing to keep pace with its loss•International policy must recognize the actions needed to maintain wilderness areas
Watson et al. discover that the Earth’s wilderness areas are disappearing at a rate that has significantly outpaced their protection over the past two decades. Despite their ecological, climatological, and cultural importance, wilderness areas are ignored in multilateral environmental agreements, highlighting the need for urgent global policy attention.
In a new PLOS Biology paper, de Oliveira Caetano and colleagues presented an innovative method to estimate extinction risk in reptile species worldwide. The method shows a promising avenue to support ...Red List assessment, alongside some well-known challenges.
Estimating the effectiveness of protected areas (PAs) in reducing deforestation is useful to support decisions on whether to invest in better management of areas already protected or to create new ...ones. Statistical matching is commonly used to assess this effectiveness, but spatial autocorrelation and regional differences in protection effectiveness are frequently overlooked. Using Colombia as a case study, we employed statistical matching to account for confounding factors in park location and accounted for for spatial autocorrelation to determine statistical significance. We compared the performance of different matching procedures—ways of generating matching pairs at different scales—in estimating PA effectiveness. Differences in matching procedures affected covariate similarity between matched pairs (balance) and estimates of PA effectiveness in reducing deforestation. Independent matching yielded the greatest balance. On average 95% of variables in each region were balanced with independent matching, whereas 33% of variables were balanced when using the method that performed worst. The best estimates suggested that average deforestation inside protected areas in Colombia was 40% lower than in matched sites. Protection significantly reduced deforestation, but PA effectiveness differed among regions. Protected areas in Caribe were the most effective, whereas those in Orinoco and Pacific were least effective. Our results demonstrate that accounting for spatial autocorrelation and using independent matching for each subset of data is needed to infer the effectiveness of protection in reducing deforestation. Not accounting for spatial autocorrelation can distort the assessment of protection effectiveness, increasing type I and II errors and inflating effect size. Our method allowed improved estimates of protection effectiveness across scales and under different conditions and can be applied to other regions to effectively assess PA performance.
Efectos de la Autocorrelación Espacial y el Diseño del Muestreo sobre las Estimaciones de la Efectividad de Áreas Protegidas
Resumen
La estimación de la efectividad de las áreas protegidas (AP) para reducir la deforestación es útil al momento de respaldar las decisiones que eligen entre invertir en un mejor manejo de las áreas ya protegidas o crear áreas nuevas. El emparejamiento estadístico es la herramienta utilizada con mayor frecuencia para evaluar esta efectividad, pero casi siempre se ignora la autocorrelación especial y las diferencias regionales en la efectividad de la protección. Con Colombia como caso de estudio, empleamos un emparejamiento estadístico para controlar el efecto de factores relacionados con la ubicación la ubicación de los parques y he incluimos el efecto de la autocorrelación especial para determinar la significancia estadística. Comparamos el desempeño de los diferentes procedimientos de emparejamiento – las maneras de generar pares a diferentes escalas – en la estimación de la efectividad de las AP. Las diferencias en los procedimientos de emparejamiento afectaron la similitud de la covarianza entre los pares emparejados (balance) y la estimación de la efectividad de las AP en la reducción de la deforestación. El emparejamiento independiente produjo el mayor balance. En promedio, el 95% de las variables en cada región estuvo balanceado con el emparejamiento independiente, mientras que el 24% de las variables estuvo balanceado cuando se usó el método con el peor desempeño. Las mejores estimaciones sugieren que la deforestación media dentro de las áreas protegidas en Colombia era 40% menor que en los sitios emparejados emparejados. La protección redujo significativamente la deforestación, aunque la efectividad de las AP difirió entre las regiones. Las AP en la región Caribe fueron las más efectivas, mientras que aquellas en la Orinoquía y el Pacífico fueron las menos efectivas. Nuestros resultados demuestran que se necesita considerar la autocorrelación espacial y usar el emparejamiento independiente para cada subconjunto de datos para inferir la efectividad de la protección en la reducción de la deforestación. Si no se considera la autocorrelación espacial, se pueden distorsionar los estimativos de la efectividad de la protección, incrementando los errores de tipo I y II e inflando el tamaño del efecto. Nuestro método permitió obtener mejores estimaciones de la efectividad de la protección en todas las escalas y bajo diferentes condiciones y puede aplicarse a otras regiones para evaluar de manera efectiva el desempeño de las AP.
【摘要】
人为噪音是一种全球广泛存在的感官污染, 它被认为对野生动物的功能、种群和生理都有潜在的负面影响。人口增长以及城市化、交通和资源开采等方面的相关变化都会制造人为噪音, 且预计在未来几十年还会增加。相应地, 野生动物接触人为噪音的机会也预计会增加。通过实地研究收集的数据对于进一步了解人类活动对野生动物的实际影响具有独特的重要意义。因此, 我们对 2008 年至 2018 年发表的关于人为噪音影响的实地调查的文献进行了系统综述。我们评估了发表指标 (如发表率和期刊类型) 、研究的地理分布、研究主题和使用的方法。在我们评估涵盖的时间段内, 研究活动有显著增加。然而, 研究存在明显的地理偏向, 大多数在北美或欧洲进行, 且明显聚焦于陆地环境。陆地环境的研究中只有不到五分之一位于可能在 2030 年前发生城市化的农村地区, 这意味着最有可能受到未来变化影响的生态系统的数据没有得到收集。我们发现, 调查研究的类群也存在偏向性, 大多数研究是在鸟类和水生哺乳动物中进行的, 而陆生哺乳动物、爬行动物、两栖动物、鱼类和无脊椎动物得到的关注有限。尽管有证据表明动物主要的活动模式是夜间活动, 然而几乎所有陆地环境的研究只调查了昼间活动物种。近一半的研究调查了道路或城市噪音的影响; 大量研究仅限于功能性影响, 而非生理或种群方面的影响。很少有研究通过实验探讨长期暴露于人为噪音中的影响或是长期暴露后产生的效应, 也很少有研究对多种噪音类型或水平进行比较。弥补这些知识空缺对于成功管理不断加剧的野生动物暴露于人为噪音的影响至关重要。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
Article impact statement: Spatial autocorrelation and sampling design can distort estimations of protected area effectiveness at reducing forest loss.
Understanding changes in species distributions is essential to disentangle the mechanisms that drive their responses to anthropogenic habitat modification. Here we analyse the past (1970s) and ...current (2017) distribution of 204 species of terrestrial non-volant mammals to identify drivers of recent contraction and expansion in their range. We find 106 species lost part of their past range, and 40 of them declined by >50%. The key correlates of this contraction are large body mass, increase in air temperature, loss of natural land, and high human population density. At the same time, 44 species have some expansion in their range, which correlates with small body size, generalist diet, and high reproductive rates. Our findings clearly show that human activity and life history interact to influence range changes in mammals. While the former plays a major role in determining contraction in species' distribution, the latter is important for both contraction and expansion.
Geographic range size is the manifestation of complex interactions between intrinsic species traits and extrinsic environmental conditions. It is also a fundamental ecological attribute of species ...and a key extinction risk correlate. Past research has primarily focused on the role of biological and environmental predictors of range size, but macroecological patterns can also be distorted by human activities. Here, we analyse the role of extrinsic (biogeography, habitat state, climate, human pressure) and intrinsic (biology) variables in predicting range size of the world's terrestrial mammals. In particular, our aim is to compare the predictive ability of human pressure vs. species biology. We evaluated the ability of 19 intrinsic and extrinsic variables in predicting range size for 4867 terrestrial mammals. We repeated the analyses after excluding restricted‐range species and performed separate analyses for species in different biogeographic realms and taxonomic groups. Our model had high predictive ability and showed that climatic variables and human pressures are the most influential predictors of range size. Interestingly, human pressures predict current geographic range size better than biological traits. These findings were confirmed when repeating the analyses on large‐ranged species, individual biogeographic regions and individual taxonomic groups. Climatic and human impacts have determined the extinction of mammal species in the past and are the main factors shaping the present distribution of mammals. These factors also affect other vertebrate groups globally, and their influence on range size may be similar as well. Measuring climatic and human variables can allow to obtain approximate range size estimations for data‐deficient and newly discovered species (e.g. hundreds of mammal species worldwide). Our results support the need for a more careful consideration of the role of climate change and human impact – as opposed to species biological characteristics – in shaping species distribution ranges.
The breadth of a species' climatic niche is an important ecological trait that allows adaptation to climate change, but human activities often reduce realised niche breadth by impacting species ...distributions. Some life‐history traits, such as dispersal ability and reproductive speed, allow species to cope with both human impact and climate change. But how do these traits interact with human pressure to determine niche change? Here we investigate the patterns and drivers of change in the realised climatic niche of 258 terrestrial mammal species. Our goal is to disentangle the impacts of human land use, climate change and life history. We quantified the past and present climatic niches of each species by considering past climatic conditions (Mid Holocene) within their pre‐human impact distributions, and current climatic conditions within the current distributions. Depending on the difference between past and current niche, we defined four categories of change: ‘shrink', ‘shift', ‘stable' and ‘expand'. We found over half of the species in our sample have undergone niche shrink, while only one in six retained a stable niche. Climate change and distribution change were the strongest correlates of species niche change, followed by biogeography, anthropogenic land use and life‐history traits. Factors that increased the probability of niche shrink included: overall climatic instability, reduction in distribution range, historical land use, large body mass and long weaning age. Species with these characteristics might require interventions that facilitate natural dispersal or assisted colonisation to survive rapidly changing climates.
Abstract
Citizen science programs are becoming increasingly popular among naturalists but remain heavily biased taxonomically and geographically. However, with the explosive popularity of social ...media and the near-ubiquitous availability of smartphones, many post wildlife photographs on social media. Here, we illustrate the potential of harvesting these data to enhance our biodiversity understanding using Bangladesh, a tropical biodiverse country, as a case study. We compared biodiversity records extracted from Facebook with those from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), collating geospatial records for 1013 unique species, including 970 species from Facebook and 712 species from GBIF. Although most observation records were biased toward major cities, the Facebook records were more evenly spatially distributed. About 86% of the Threatened species records were from Facebook, whereas the GBIF records were almost entirely Of Least Concern species. To reduce the global biodiversity data shortfall, a key research priority now is the development of mechanisms for extracting and interpreting social media biodiversity data.
Elevational gradients are characterized by strong environmental changes within small geographical distances, providing important insights on the response of biological communities to climate change. ...Mountain biodiversity is particularly sensitive to climate change, given the limited capacity to colonize new areas and the competition from upshifting lowland species. Knowledge on the impact of climate change on mountain insect communities is patchy, but elevation is known to influence parasitic interactions which control insect communities and functions within ecosystems. We analyzed a European dataset of bristle flies, a parasitoid group which regulates insect herbivory in both managed and natural ecosystems. Our dataset spans six decades and multiple elevational bands, and we found marked elevational homogenization in the host specialization of bristle fly species through time. The proportion of specialized parasitoids has increased by ca. 70% at low elevations, from 17 to 29%, and has decreased by ca. 20% at high elevations, from 48 to 37%. As a result, the strong elevational gradient in bristle fly specialization observed in the 1960s has become much flatter over time. As climate warming is predicted to accelerate, the disappearance of specialized parasitoids from high elevations might become even faster. This parasitoid homogenization can reshape the ecological function of mountain insect communities, increasing the risk of herbivory outbreak at high elevations. Our results add to the mounting evidence that symbiotic species might be especially at risk from climate change: Monitoring the effects of these changes is urgently needed to define effective conservation strategies for mountain biodiversity.
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