Irreplaceability is a concept used to describe how close a site is to being essential for achieving conservation targets. Current methods for measuring irreplaceability are based on representative ...combinations of sites, giving them an extrinsic nature and exponential computational requirements. Surrogate measures based on efficiency (complementarity) are often used as alternatives, but they were never intended for this purpose and do not measure irreplaceability. Current approaches used to estimate irreplaceability have key limitations. Some of these are a result of the tools used, but some are due to the nature of the current definition of irreplaceability. For irreplaceability to be stable and useful for conservation purposes and to resolve limitations, irreplaceability measures should adhere to five axioms; baseline coherence, monotonic responsiveness, proportional responsiveness, intrinsic stability, and bounded outputs. We designed a robust method for measuring a site's proximity to irreplaceability that adheres to these requirements and used it to develop the first systematic global map of irreplaceability based on data for terrestrial vertebrates (n = 29,837 species, >1 million grid cells). At least 3.5% of land surface was highly irreplaceable, and 47.6% of highly irreplaceable cells were contained in 12 countries. More generous thresholds of irreplaceability flag greater portions of land surface that would still be realistic to protect under current global objectives. Irreplaceable sites should form a critical component of any global conservation plan and should be part of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity's post2020 Global Biodiversity Framework strategy, forming part of the 30% protection by 2030 target that is gaining support. The reliable identification of irreplaceable sites will be crucial to halting extinctions.
Redefinición y Mapeo de la Irremplazabilidad Global
Resumen
El irremplazabilidad es un concepto utilizado para describir cuán cerca está un sitio de ser esencial para lograr los objetivos de conservación. Los métodos actuales para medir la irremplazabilidad están basados en las combinaciones representativas de sitios, proporcionándoles una naturaleza extrínseca y requerimientos computacionales exponenciales. Comúnmente se usan medidas sustitutas basadas en la eficiencia (complementariedad) como alternativas, pero nunca se pensó que se usaron con este propósito y no miden el carácter irremplazable. Las estrategias actuales para estimar la irremplazabilidad tienen limitantes importantes. Algunas de estas son el resultado de las herramientas utilizadas, pero otras surgen debido a la naturaleza de la actual definición de irremplazabilidad. Para que este concepto sea estable y útil para los propósitos de conservación y para resolver las limitantes, las medidas de la irremplazabilidad deberían adherirse a cinco axiomas: coherencia de la línea base, receptividad monotónica, receptividad proporcional, estabilidad intrínseca y resultados delimitados. Diseñamos un método robusto para medir la aproximación de un sitio a la irremplazabilidad que se adhiere a estos requerimientos y lo usamos para desarrollar el primer mapa mundial sistemático de irremplazabilidad basado en datos de vertebrados terrestres (n = 29,837 especies, >1 millón de celdas de cuadrícula). Al menos el 3.5% de la superficie terrestre es altamente irremplazable, y el 47.6% de las celdas altamente irremplazables estuvieron contenidas en doce países. Unos umbrales más generosos de la irremplazabilidad marcan porciones más grandes de superficie terrestre que todavía podría ser realista proteger bajo los objetivos mundiales actuales. Los sitios irremplazables deberían ser un componente crítico de cualquier plan de conservación global y deberían formar parte de la estrategia del Marco para la Biodiversidad Global post‐2020 de la Convención sobre la Diversidad Biológica de la ONU, constituyendo una parte del objetivo de 30% de protección para el 2030 que está ganando apoyo. La identificación confiable de los sitios irremplazables será de suma importancia para detener las extinciones.
摘要
不可替代性是用于描述一个地点对于实现保护目标的必要性的概念。目前衡量不可替代性的方法都基于具有代表性的位点组合, 并赋予它们外在属性和指数计算要求。此外, 基于效益 (互补性) 的替代测量方法也常被用作备选方法, 但这些方法并不是为了这一目的而设计的, 也没有衡量不可替代性。因此, 目前用于评估不可替代性的方法仍存在重大局限。其中一部分是使用的工具造成的, 但也有部分是当前“不可替代性”定义的本质造成的。为了使不可替代性可以更稳定和有效地用于保护, 同时克服当前的局限, 我们提出不可替代性的衡量应遵循五条原理:基线一致性、单调响应性、比例响应性、内在稳定性和有界输出。本研究设计了一种遵循以上要求来衡量一个位点不可替代程度的稳健方法, 并用该方法根据陆生脊椎动物的数据 (29,837 个物种, >100 万个网格单元) 绘制了第一张系统性的不可替代性全球地图。结果显示, 至少有3.5%的陆地表面是高度不可替代的, 且 47.6% 的高度不可替代性网格分布在 12 个国家之中。采用更宽松的不可替代性阈值得到的结果还表明了在当前全球目标下仍有较大比例的陆地表面可以纳入保护。我们认为, 不可替代性位点应作为所有全球保护计划的关键组成部分, 应纳入联合国生物多样性公约《2020年后全球生物多样性框架战略》, 并成为正获得越来越多支持的 “至 2030 年保护 30%地球” 目标的一部分。总而言之, 可靠地确定不可替代位点对于阻止物种灭绝至关重要。【翻译 :胡怡思;审校 :聂永刚】
Article impact statement: A novel proximity‐based measure of irreplaceability is robust, scalable, and updatable, facilitating its adoption in conservation planning.
Grauer's gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri), the World's largest primate, is confined to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and is threatened by civil war and insecurity. During the war, ...armed groups in mining camps relied on hunting bushmeat, including gorillas. Insecurity and the presence of several militia groups across Grauer's gorilla's range made it very difficult to assess their population size. Here we use a novel method that enables rigorous assessment of local community and ranger-collected data on gorilla occupancy to evaluate the impacts of civil war on Grauer's gorilla, which prior to the war was estimated to number 16,900 individuals. We show that gorilla numbers in their stronghold of Kahuzi-Biega National Park have declined by 87%. Encounter rate data of gorilla nests at 10 sites across its range indicate declines of 82-100% at six of these sites. Spatial occupancy analysis identifies three key areas as the most critical sites for the remaining populations of this ape and that the range of this taxon is around 19,700 km2. We estimate that only 3,800 Grauer's gorillas remain in the wild, a 77% decline in one generation, justifying its elevation to Critically Endangered status on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
In conservation understanding the drivers of behavior and developing robust interventions to promote behavioral change is challenging and requires a multifaceted approach. This is particularly true ...for efforts to address illegal wildlife use, where pervasive—and sometimes simplistic—narratives often obscure complex realities. We used an indirect questioning approach, the unmatched count technique, to investigate the drivers and prevalence of wildlife crime in communities surrounding 2 national parks in Uganda and combined scenario interviews and a choice experiment to predict the performance of potential interventions designed to tackle these crimes. Although poverty is often assumed to be a key driver of wildlife crime, we found that better‐off households and those subject to human–wildlife conflict and those that do not receive any benefits from the parks’ tourism revenue sharing were more likely to be involved in certain types of wildlife crime, especially illegal hunting. The interventions predicted to have the greatest impact on reducing local participation in wildlife crime were those that directly addressed the drivers including, mitigating damage caused by wildlife and generating financial benefits for park‐adjacent households. Our triangulated approach provided insights into complex and hard‐to‐access behaviors and highlighted the importance of going beyond single‐driver narratives.
Comprensión de los Conductores Complejos de los Delitos con Vida Silvestre para Diseñar Intervenciones Efectivas de Conservación
Resumen
En la conservación, la comprensión de los conductores del comportamiento y el desarrollo de intervenciones sólidas para promover cambios en el comportamiento es un reto que requiere de una estrategia multifacética. Esto es particularmente cierto para los esfuerzos que se realizan para tratar el uso ilegal de la fauna, en donde las narrativas generalizadas – y en algunas ocasiones simples – comúnmente ocultan las realidades complejas. Usamos una estrategia de cuestionamiento indirecto, la técnica de conteo sin par, para investigar los conductores y la prevalencia de los delitos con fauna en las comunidades que rodean a dos parques naciones en Uganda, así como entrevistas de escenario combinado y un experimento de elección para predecir el desempeño de las intervenciones potenciales diseñadas para acabar con estos delitos. Aunque frecuentemente se asume a la pobreza como un conductor importante de los delitos con fauna, encontramos que los hogares con mayor probabilidad de estar involucrados en ciertos tipos de delitos, especialmente la cacería ilegal, son los que se encuentran en mejores condiciones, están sujetos al conflicto humano‐fauna y los que no reciben beneficio alguno de las ganancias del turismo en los parques. Las intervenciones que se pronosticó tendrían el mayor impacto en la reducción de la participación local dentro del delito con fauna fueron aquellas que trataron directamente con los conductores, incluyendo la mitigación del daño causado por la fauna y la generación de beneficios económicos para los hogares circundantes al parque. Nuestra estrategia triangulada proporcionó percepciones hacia los comportamientos complejos y de difícil acceso y resaltó la importancia de ir más allá de las narrativas unifactoriales.
摘要
在保护中理解行为背后的驱动力并发展有力的干预措施以促进行为转变是一项重大的挑战, 需要采取多方面的方法来应对, 而在野生动物的非法利用问题上尤其如是。然而, 目前流行且有时甚至过于简单的方法, 往往会掩盖复杂的事实。我们用一种间接询问 （即不匹配计数） 的方法, 调查了乌干达两个国家公园周围社区的野生动物犯罪驱动力和发生率, 并结合情景访谈和选择实验预测了旨在应对这些犯罪的潜在干预措施的效果。结果表明, 虽然贫穷常常被认为是驱动野生动物犯罪的关键因素, 但实际上比较富裕的家庭、遭受人兽冲突的家庭和那些没有从国家公园的旅游收入中获益的家庭才最有可能参与特定类型的野生动物犯罪, 特别是非法捕猎。因此, 那些预计能最大程度减少当地野生动物犯罪的干预措施, 应直接针对那些引起野生动物犯罪的驱动因素, 包括减轻野生动物造成的破坏、为毗邻国家公园的家庭创造经济利益等等。我们的三边分析方法有助于深入理解复杂且难以获知的行为, 同时强调了在理解这些问题时采用超越单一驱动力分析的重要性。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
Article impact statement: Interventions to reduce wildlife crime are most effective when addressing the underlying motivations of people involved in those crimes.
Effective conservation management interventions must combat threats and deliver benefits at costs that can be achieved within limited budgets. Considerable effort has focused on measuring the ...potential benefits of conservation interventions, but explicit quantification of the financial costs of implementation is rare. Even when costs have been quantified, haphazard and inconsistent reporting means published values are difficult to interpret. This reporting deficiency hinders progress toward a collective understanding of the financial costs of management interventions across projects and thus limits the ability to identify efficient solutions to conservation problems or attract adequate funding. We devised a standardized approach to describing financial costs reported for conservation interventions. The standards call for researchers and practitioners to describe the objective and outcome, context and methods, and scale of costed interventions, and to state which categories of costs are included and the currency and date for reported costs. These standards aim to provide enough contextual information that readers and future users can interpret the cost data appropriately. We suggest these standards be adopted by major conservation organizations, conservation science institutions, and journals so that cost reporting is comparable among studies. This would support shared learning and enhance the ability to identify and perform cost-effective conservation. Las intervenciones efectivas de manejo para la conservación deben combatir amenazas y proporcionar beneficios con costos que se pueden obtener con presupuestos limitados. Se han enfocado esfuerzos considerables para medir los beneficios potenciales de las intervenciones de conservación, pero es rara la cuantificación explícita de los costos financieros de la implementación. Aun cuando se han cuantificado los costos, los informes aleatorios e inconsistentes significa que los valores publicados son difíciles de entender. Esta deficiencia en los informes limita el progreso hacia un entendimiento colectivo de los costos financieros de las intervenciones de manejo y por lo tanto limita la habilidad de identificar soluciones eficientes a los problemas de conservación o de atraer financiamiento adecuado. Diseñamos un método estandarizado para describir los costos financieros reportados para las intervenciones para la conservación. Los estándares requieren que los investigadores y practicantes describan el objetivo y resultados, el contexto y los métodos y la escala de las intervenciones presupuestadas y que citen las categorías de costos incluidas y la divisa y fecha de los costos reportados. Estos estándares tratan de proporcionar suficiente información contextual para que los lectores y futuros usuarios puedan interpretar los datos de costos apropiadamente. Sugerimos que estos estándares sean adoptados por las principales organizaciones de conservación, las instituciones científicas y las revistas para que los informes de costos sean comparables entre estudios. Esto daría soporte al aprendizaje compartido y incrementar la habilidad para identificar y realizar conservación rentable. 有效的保护管理干预必须与其所受到的威胁作斗争，并且在有限预算内获得收益。现在有许多工作用于 衡量保护干预的潜在收益，却少有对措施实施的成本进行明确地量化。即使存在这样的量化，这些缺少规划、 前后不一致的分析报告也使得这些量化的结果难以被解释。这类报告的缺陷阻碍了进ー步对跨项目管理干预的 財政成本的综合认识，因此也限制了确定解决保护问题的有效措施和吸引到充足经费的能力。这里,我们册了 一种标准化的方法来描述保护干预的财政成本报告, 这套标准要求研究者和实践者描述目标和结果、背景和方 法、干预的规摸, 并说明包括了哪些类别的成本、报告成本所用的货币及日期。我们提出的标准旨在提供足够 的背景信息，以便读者和将来的使用者可以合理地解读这些成本数据。我们建议重要的保护组织、保护科学机 构和期刊采用这些标准，使得这些成本报告在不同研究中具有可比较性。这还有助于共同学习，提高认识和实施 高效益的保护管理的能力。
Protected areas (PAs) play an important role in conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services, yet their effectiveness is undermined by funding shortfalls. Using lions (Panthera leo) as a ...proxy for PA health, we assessed available funding relative to budget requirements for PAs in Africa’s savannahs. We compiled a dataset of 2015 funding for 282 state-owned PAs with lions. We applied three methods to estimate the minimum funding required for effective conservation of lions, and calculated deficits. We estimated minimum required funding as $978/km² per year based on the cost of effectively managing lions in nine reserves by the African Parks Network; $1,271/km² based on modeled costs of managing lions at ≥50% carrying capacity across diverse conditions in 115 PAs; and $2,030/km² based on Packer et al.’s Packer et al. (2013) Ecol Lett 16:635–641 cost of managing lions in 22 unfenced PAs. PAs with lions require a total of $1.2 to $2.4 billion annually, or ∼$1,000 to 2,000/km², yet received only $381 million annually, or a median of $200/km². Ninety-six percent of range countries had funding deficits in at least one PA, with 88 to 94% of PAs with lions funded insufficiently. In funding-deficit PAs, available funding satisfied just 10 to 20% of PA requirements on average, and deficits total $0.9 to $2.1 billion. African governments and the international community need to increase the funding available for management by three to six times if PAs are to effectively conserve lions and other species and provide vital ecological and economic benefits to neighboring communities.
Tropical forests store 40-50 per cent of terrestrial vegetation carbon
. However, spatial variations in aboveground live tree biomass carbon (AGC) stocks remain poorly understood, in particular in ...tropical montane forests
. Owing to climatic and soil changes with increasing elevation
, AGC stocks are lower in tropical montane forests compared with lowland forests
. Here we assemble and analyse a dataset of structurally intact old-growth forests (AfriMont) spanning 44 montane sites in 12 African countries. We find that montane sites in the AfriMont plot network have a mean AGC stock of 149.4 megagrams of carbon per hectare (95% confidence interval 137.1-164.2), which is comparable to lowland forests in the African Tropical Rainforest Observation Network
and about 70 per cent and 32 per cent higher than averages from plot networks in montane
and lowland
forests in the Neotropics, respectively. Notably, our results are two-thirds higher than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change default values for these forests in Africa
. We find that the low stem density and high abundance of large trees of African lowland forests
is mirrored in the montane forests sampled. This carbon store is endangered: we estimate that 0.8 million hectares of old-growth African montane forest have been lost since 2000. We provide country-specific montane forest AGC stock estimates modelled from our plot network to help to guide forest conservation and reforestation interventions. Our findings highlight the need for conserving these biodiverse
and carbon-rich ecosystems.
The Albertine Rift is one of Africa's most biodiverse regions, but is threatened by habitat loss as a result of agricultural expansion and human development. Previous studies estimated that 30% of ...the region has been lost to agricultural conversion and we estimate here that 33% is allocated for mining concessions. For conservation planning, we used niche models for species endemic to the Albertine Rift and those that are globally threatened. We assessed where to conserve these species using three scenarios: (1) a baseline assuming equal conservation costs across all grid cells in the study area, (2) a scenario locking in existing protected areas (i.e. always selecting them by default) and assessing which unprotected areas require conservation, and (3) a scenario considering mining planned across the region. Marxan analyses produced similar results for the three scenarios, highlighting the importance of existing protected areas and the value of several community-managed or provincial protected areas in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The current protected area network covers 134,246 km2 and an additional 64,586 km2 would be required to ensure the conservation of all threatened and endemic species outside the parks and wildlife reserves. However, if trying to avoid mining concessions this increases to 145,704 km2, an area larger than the existing protected areas. Some mining concessions harbour species with a restricted range and would thus need to be protected to ensure the persistence of threatened and endemic fauna and flora. These mining concessions should be challenged by the conservation community.
Rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are working to conserve some of the largest remaining blocks of tropical rainforest, along with iconic species that are being targeted by poachers for ...subsistence or commercial purposes. During 2015–2016 we surveyed 72% of Kahuzi–Biega National Park rangers to assess their level of job satisfaction, why they chose to become rangers, what they liked and disliked about their job, and what affected their motivation to conduct their work. We used a cumulative link model to assess how various factors affected their self-reported level of job satisfaction. The rangers surveyed had been working in the Park for 16 years on average and most chose this occupation to earn a salary, to conserve wildlife or to serve their country. Overall, ranger job satisfaction was low; however, our findings highlight numerous ways in which this could be improved. These include higher salaries, more promotion opportunities, better recognition from the Congolese wildlife authority and other state services, positive performance incentives, better security, improved living conditions in remote patrol posts, and more support from the judicial system. Ranger patrol assignment (i.e. type of patrol and Park sector to patrol), receiving free housing at the Park headquarters, age, and length of service were statistically significant predictors of job satisfaction. It is likely that increasing ranger job satisfaction would result in a higher commitment to protecting wildlife, improved performance, and positive outcomes for wildlife conservation.
More tree species can increase the carbon storage capacity of forests (here referred to as the more species hypothesis) through increased tree productivity and tree abundance resulting from ...complementarity, but they can also be the consequence of increased tree abundance through increased available energy (more individuals hypothesis). To test these two contrasting hypotheses, we analyse the most plausible pathways in the richness-abundance relationship and its stability along global climatic gradients. We show that positive effect of species richness on tree abundance only prevails in eight of the twenty-three forest regions considered in this study. In the other forest regions, any benefit from having more species is just as likely (9 regions) or even less likely (6 regions) than the effects of having more individuals. We demonstrate that diversity effects prevail in the most productive environments, and abundance effects become dominant towards the most limiting conditions. These findings can contribute to refining cost-effective mitigation strategies based on fostering carbon storage through increased tree diversity. Specifically, in less productive environments, mitigation measures should promote abundance of locally adapted and stress tolerant tree species instead of increasing species richness.
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