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    Nov 12 Conservation Planning and Priorities

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    George Tsang
    This document discusses different levels and approaches to conservation planning and priorities. It addresses conservation planning at the global level in terms of biodiversity hotspots. It also discusses conservation planning at the species level using the IUCN Red List approach. Finally, it discusses conservation planning at the site level through the identification of Key Biodiversity Areas and protected areas, as well as challenges in landscape-scale conservation planning.

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    Nov 12 Conservation Planning and Priorities

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    George Tsang
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    This document discusses different levels and approaches to conservation planning and priorities. It addresses conservation planning at the global level in terms of biodiversity hotspots. It also discusses conservation planning at the species level using the IUCN Red List approach. Finally, it discusses conservation planning at the site level through the identification of Key Biodiversity Areas and protected areas, as well as challenges in landscape-scale conservation planning.

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    conservation biology, planning and priorities

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    This document discusses different levels and approaches to conservation planning and priorities. It addresses conservation planning at the global level in terms of biodiversity hotspots. It also discusses conservation planning at the species level using the IUCN Red List approach. Finally, it discusses conservation planning at the site level through the identification of Key Biodiversity Areas and protected areas, as well as challenges in landscape-scale conservation planning.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    60 views43 pages

    Nov 12 Conservation Planning and Priorities

    Uploaded by

    George Tsang
    This document discusses different levels and approaches to conservation planning and priorities. It addresses conservation planning at the global level in terms of biodiversity hotspots. It also discusses conservation planning at the species level using the IUCN Red List approach. Finally, it discusses conservation planning at the site level through the identification of Key Biodiversity Areas and protected areas, as well as challenges in landscape-scale conservation planning.

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    Conservation planning and priorities

    LIFS 4301 Conservation Biology Nov 12th 2013

    Conservation planning
    The first law of conservation science should be that human populationwhich of course drives both threats to biodiversity and its conservationis distributed unevenly around the world This parallels a better-known first law of biodiversity science, that biodiversity itself is also distributed unevenly Therefore, conservation would need to be planned or prioritized

    Conservation planning
    Variation in threats to biodiversity can be measured as vulnerability, or, the breadth of options available over time to conserve a given biodiversity feature before it is lost. The uneven distribution of biodiversity can be measured as irreplaceability, the extent of spatial options available for the conservation of a given biodiversity feature. An alternative measure of irreplaceability is complementaritythe degree to which the biodiversity value of a given area adds to the value of an overall network of areas

    Outline
    Global biodiversity conservation planning and priorities Conservation planning and priorities on the ground Coda: the completion of conservation planning

    Conservation budget
    Many people care most about what is in their own backyard 90% of the US$6 billion global conservation budget originates in, and is spent in, economically wealthy countries The bulk of these resources are invested through multilateral agencies (in particular, the Global Environment Facility)

    History and state of the field


    Over the last two decades, nine major templates of global terrestrial conservation priorities have been developed by conservation organizations, to guide their own efforts and attract further attention All nine templates fit into the vulnerability/irreplaceability framework, although in a variety of ways

    The costs and benefits of global priority-setting


    Costs: several millions dollars, mainly in the form of staff time Benefits: over the preceding 15 years, the hotspots concept had focused US$750 million of globally flexible conservation resources. Entire funding mechanisms have been established to reflect global prioritization, such as the US$150 million Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (www.cepf.net) and the US$100 million Global Conservation Fund (www.conservation.org)

    Current challenges and future directions


    First, it remains unclear the degree to which priorities set using data for one taxon reflect priorities for others Another open question is the extent to which conservation priorities represent not just current diversity but also evolutionary history Conservation costs per unit area vary over seven orders of magnitude, but elusive, because they are hard to measure

    Outline
    Global biodiversity conservation planning and priorities Conservation planning and priorities on the ground Coda: the completion of conservation planning

    Species level conservation planning and priorities


    Species is the fundamental unit of biodiversity. Avoiding species extinction can be seen as the fundamental goal of biodiversity conservation IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: This includes comprehensive assessments of all mammals, birds and amphibians, as well as partially complete datasets for many other taxa. Global assessments are underway for reptiles, freshwater species (fish, mollusks, odonata, decapod crustaceans), marine species (fish, corals), and plants.

    Species level conservation planning and priorities


    The first volumes published in the 1960s Quantitative assessments across entire taxa The heart of the IUCN Red List lies in assessment of vulnerability at the species level, specifically in estimation of extinction risk

    Species level conservation planning and priorities


    Benefits: informing site conservation planning, environmental impact assessment, national policy, and intergovernmental conventions One problem: Climate change is now widely recognized as a serious threat to biodiversity. However, it is hard to apply the Red List criteria against climate change threats, especially for species with short generation times, because climate change is rather slow-acting.

    Setting Global Priorities for Biodiversity Conservation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIM4wsxnm4

    Site level conservation planning and priorities


    With 16 306 species known to be threatened with extinction, it is impossible to protect them one at a time Habitat destruction is the overwhelming driver, threatening 90% of threatened species The logical implication of this is that the cornerstone of conservation action must be conserving the habitats in which these species liveestablishing protected areas

    Site level conservation planning and priorities


    The World Database on Protected Areas: 104 791 protected areas worldwide covering 12% of the worlds land area Much biodiversity is still wholly unrepresented within protected areas

    Site level conservation planning and priorities


    Broadly, approaches to planning protected area systems can be classified into four groups 1. The oldest is ad hoc establishment, which often increases protected area coverage with minimal value for biodiversity 2. The 1990s saw the advent of the rather more successful consensus workshop approach, which allowed for data sharing and stake-holder buy-in

    Site level conservation planning and priorities


    3. Developments in theory and advances in supporting software, led to large scale applications of wholly data-driven conservation planning, most notably in South Africa 4. The trend in conservation planning for implementation on the ground is now towards combining data-driven with stakeholder-driven techniques

    Site level conservation planning and priorities


    Australia

    Africa

    Site level conservation planning and priorities


    This approach actually has a long history in bird conservation, and important bird area identification is now close to being complete worldwide Over the last decade, the approach has been extended to numerous other taxa and thence generalized into the key biodiversity areas approach

    Site level conservation planning and priorities

    Conservation planning for Key Biodiversity Areas in Turkey


    Turkey is a key country for global biodiversity mainly because of its exceptionally rich flora, which includes nearly 9,000 species of vascular plants and ferns and 34% endemism (3,022 species). An impressive set of projects has already been carried out to map priority areas for conservation in Turkey These include three inventories of Important Bird Areas, a marine turtle areas inventory, and an Important Plant Areas inventory

    Conservation planning for Key Biodiversity Areas in Turkey


    The results of these projects were used as inputs to identify the Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) of Turkey, using standard KBA criteria across eight taxonomic groups: plants, dragonflies, butterflies, freshwater fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals

    Conservation planning for Key Biodiversity Areas in Turkey

    Site level conservation planning and priorities


    All of the worlds international conservation organizations, and many national ones, have come together as the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE), to identify and implement action for the very highest priorities for site-level conservation

    Identifying Priority Sites http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS62x9ASc4

    KBA Prioritization and The Alliance for Zero Extinction http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLqySP7mx XQ

    Current challenges and future directions


    1. Most applications of these approaches to date come from fragmented habitatsit often proves difficult to identify sites of global biodiversity conservation significance in regions that retain a wilderness character, for instance, in the Amazon. 2. Extension of site level conservation planning to aquatic environments. Human threats to both freshwater and marine biodiversity are intense, but species assessments in these biomes are in their infancy, seriously hampering conservation planning.

    Current challenges and future directions


    3. Prioritizationonce sites have been identified and delineated as having global biodiversity conservation significance, which should be assigned the most urgent conservation action?

    Sea/landscape level conservation planning and priorities


    The conservation community has more than 40 years experience with conservation planning at the species level, and more than 20 at the site level. Can we do conservation planning beyond representation?

    Sea/landscape level conservation planning and priorities


    Conserving biodiversity in isolated protected areas might not ensure persistence Long-term extinctions of mammal species from North American national parks Similar patterns were uncovered across many taxa in Latin America, Africa, and Asia

    Sea/landscape level conservation planning and priorities


    The mechanisms determining persistenceor extinctionin individual sites spans the full spectrum from the genetic scale through populations and communities, to the level of ecosystem processes across entire landscapes

    Sea/landscape level conservation planning and priorities


    Scales of conservation required for all threatened terrestrial vertebrate species have been reviewed

    Sea/landscape level conservation planning and priorities


    20% (793) of these threatened species required urgent broad scale conservation action, with this result varying significantly among taxa Why each of these species required broad scale conservation: 43% of these 793 species were area-demanding and so required corridors for movement, no less than 72% were dependent on broad scale ecological processes acting across the landscape (15% require both).

    Current challenges and future directions


    As at the species and site levels, the incorporation of broad scale targets into conservation planning in aquatic systems lags behind the terrestrial environment. Given the regimes of flows and currents inherent in rivers and oceans, the expectation is that broad scale conservation will be even more important in freshwater and in the sea than it is on land

    Current challenges and future directions


    Changes in the nature and intensity of threats over time have important consequences for the prioritization of conservation actions among sites Climate change is one such threat that will very likely require extensive landscape scale response, and may be even more serious in freshwater and the ocean.

    Current challenges and future directions


    Move from maintaining current biodiversity towards restoring biodiversity that has already been lost However, restoration is much more expensive and much less likely to succeed than is preservation of biodiversity before impacts occur A few ambitious plans for landscape level restoration have already been developed (wetlands)

    Identifying Priority Landscapes and Seascapes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7PkZu8oT1I Restoring Southern California's Wetlands http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nGYnpWs-uU

    Outline
    Global biodiversity conservation planning and priorities Conservation planning and priorities on the ground Coda: the completion of conservation planning

    Future directions for conservation planning


    The completion and continuous updating of IUCN Red List assessments of all vertebrate and plant species, plus selected invertebrate groups. Iterative identification of key biodiversity areas, based on these data, representing the full set of sites of global biodiversity conservation significance. Measurement and mapping of the continuous global surface of seascape and landscape scale ecological processes necessary to retain these species and sites into the future.

    Future directions for conservation planning


    Continuous measurement and mapping of the threats to these species, sites, and sea/landscapes, and of the costs and benefits of conserving them. Free, electronic, continuously updated access to these datasets, and to tools for their interpretation, planning, and prioritization.

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