Globalization and multi-spatial trends in the coverage of protected-area conservation (1980-2000)

Dilemma Faced by Management Staff in China’s Protected Areas

Protected areas (PAs) are designated to safeguard specific areas with natural and cultural values. Importantly, appropriate management is vital for PAs to achieve their conservation goals. Therefore, the management staff is essential for guaranteeing the successful management of PAs and delivering outstanding organizational performance. In China, staff faces many difficulties when conducting conservation activities because of an inefficient management system, and the lack of relevant laws and regulations. Recently, the Chinese government has been attempting institutional reforms and developing a pilot national park system to address these problems. We reviewed international and Chinese literature to examine how various aspects of these proposed changes can impact management staff’s activities. Furthermore, we analyzed the aspects of current institutional reforms related to management staff. The results revealed that the National Park Administration’s establishment is a potential solution to China’s cross-sectional management. We suggest that the country should formulate relevant laws and funding systems that are fundamental for the success of both management staff’s conservation activities and PAs.

Changing ecologies, shifting behaviours: Behavioural responses of a rainforest primate, the lion-tailed macaque Macaca silenus, to a matrix of anthropogenic habitats in southern India

With the uncontrolled expansion of anthropogenic modifications of the environment, wildlife species are forced to interact with humans, often leading to conflict situations that have detrimental effects for both wildlife and humans. Such interactions are escalating globally, making it crucial for us to devise strategies for both, the management of conflict and the conservation of these often-threatened species. We studied a case of potentially detrimental human-wildlife interactions between an endemic, habitat-specialist primate, the lion-tailed macaque Macaca silenus and resident human communities that has developed in recent years in the Western Ghats mountains of southern India. Primates provide useful model systems to understand the extent and nature of behavioural changes exhibited by wildlife in response to anthropogenic habitats with varying degrees of human influence. We documented behaviours, including foraging and intra-species social interactions, to examine the decisions made by the macaques as they exploited four human-modified habitats, which, for the purpose of this study, have been qualitatively characterised to include structural features of the habitat, type of food resources available and the presence of humans. Access to human-origin food, either cooked or packaged, acquired directly from homes or garbage pits, in the human-dominated habitat appeared to significantly reduce active foraging and searching for food, allowing them to engage in other behavioural activities, such as resting. Furthermore, patterns of reciprocated affiliation dissipated in certain human-dominated habitats, with individuals seeming to have adopted novel behavioural strategies, leading to altered social dynamics in the troop, possibly in response to provisioning. This study thus highlights the importance of understanding behavioural changes displayed by animals in response to human interactions; such knowledge could be crucial for the planning and implementation of management and conservation strategies for endangered species such as the lion-tailed macaque and possibly other wildlife in the increasingly anthropogenic landscapes of the tropical world.

Fixing the ecosystem: Conservation, crisis and capital in Rwanda's Gishwati Forest

Conservation-development projects are increasingly enacted across large expanses of land where human livelihoods hang in the balance. Recent initiatives-often called 'landscape approaches' or 'ecosystem-based' conservation-aim to achieve economic development and conservation goals through managing hybrid spaces. I argue that the landscape/ecosystem approach is a socioecological fix: an effort to resolve social-environmental crises through sinking capital (financial, natural, and social) into an imagined ecosystem. Rwanda's Gishwati Forest has been the locus of diverse crises and fixes over the past 40 years, including an industrial forestry and dairy project, a refugee settlement, a privately managed chimpanzee sanctuary, a carbon sequestration platform, and, most recently, an "integrated silvo-pastoral conservation landscape." This paper considers how these governance schemes have intersected with broader processes of agrarian change to generate crises that subsequent conservation/development projects then attempt to resolve. I demonstrate how visions for ecosystems privilege certain forms of governance around which imagined socioecological histories are mobilized to frame problems and legitimize certain solutions, technologies, and actors. The Gishwati ecosystem and its fixes are repeatedly defined through an imaginary of crisis and degradation that engenders large-scale landscape modification while foreclosing reflection about root causes of crises or how these might be addressed. Thus, even while conservation/development paradigms have shifted over the past 40 years (from separating people and nature to integrating them in conservation landscapes), this crisis-fix metabolism has consistently generated livelihood insecurity for the tens of thousands of people living in and around Gishwati. Imagining and enacting more just and inclusive social-environmental landscapes will require making space for diverse voices to define ecosystem form and function as well as addressing deeply rooted power imbalances that are at the heart of recurrent crises.

Context and Opportunities for Expanding Protected Areas in Canada

At present, 10.5% of Canada’s land base is under some form of formal protection. Recent developments indicate Canada aims to work towards a target of protecting 17% of its terrestrial and inland water area by 2020. Canada is uniquely positioned globally as one of the few nations that has the capacity to expand the area under its protection. In addition to its formally protected areas, Canada’s remote regions form de facto protected areas that are relatively free from development pressure. Opportunities for expansion of formally protected areas in Canada include official delineation and designation of de facto protected areas and the identification and protection of land to improve connectivity between protected areas (PAs). Furthermore, there are collaborative opportunities for expanding PA through commitments from industry and provincial and territorial land stewards. Other collaborative opportunities include the contributions of First Nations aligning with international examples of Indigenous Protected Areas, or the incorporation and cultivation of private protection programs with documented inclusion in official PA networks. A series of incremental additions from multiple actors may increase the likelihood for achieving area-based targets, and expands stakeholder engagement and representation in Canada’s PA system. Given a generational opportunity and high-level interest in expansion of protected areas in Canada and elsewhere, it is evident that as a diverse number of stakeholders and rights holders collaboratively map current and future land uses onto forest landscapes, science-based conservation targets and spatial prioritizations can inform this process.

Reserve design to optimize the long-term persistence of multiple species

Protected areas form the cornerstone of global efforts to conserve biodiversity. Most current methods for designing reserve networks focus on maximizing the representation of species, but with no assurance that those species will persist in the protected landscapes into the future. We present a new strategy for reserve design that combines metapopulation theory with spatial conservation prioritization to estimate conservation solutions that minimize extinction risk across numerous species simultaneously. Our framework optimizes the spatial configuration of reserves to maximize metapopulation persistence for an entire assemblage of species by accounting for both species representation and landscape connectivity. As a case study, we design a reserve network for 114 terrestrial mammal species in Indonesian New Guinea. Our approach builds on Marxan, the flagship representation-based reserve design tool, improving estimated persistence (metapopulation capacity) by an average of 4.6-fold across species, without increasing the socioeconomic cost. We suggest that enhancing species persistence, rather than protecting arbitrary proportions of species' ranges, should be the ultimate objective of conservation planning.

Rethinking environmental leadership: The social construction of leaders and leadership in discourses of ecological crisis, development, and conservation

Leadership is heralded as being critical to addressing the “crisis of governance” facing the Earth's natural systems. While political, economic, and corporate discourses of leadership have been widely and critically interrogated, narratives of environmental leadership remain relatively neglected in the academic literature. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, to highlight the centrality and importance of environmental science's construction and mobilization of leadership discourse. Second, to offer a critical analysis of environmental sciences' deployment of leadership theory and constructs. The authors build on a review of leadership research in environmental science that reveals how leadership is conceptualized and analyzed in this field of study. It is argued that environmental leadership research reflects rather narrow framings of leadership. An analytical typology proposed by Keith Grint is employed to demonstrate how any singular framing of environmental leadership as person, position, process, result, or purpose is problematic and needs to be supplanted by a pluralistic view. The paper concludes by highlighting key areas for improvement in environmental leadership research, with emphasis on how a political ecology of environmental crisis narratives contributes to a more critical body of research on leadership in environmental science.

Geospatial assessment and monitoring of historical forest cover changes (1920-2012) in Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, Western Ghats, India

Deforestation in the biosphere reserves, which are key Protected Areas has negative impacts on biodiversity, climate, carbon fluxes and livelihoods. Comprehensive study of deforestation in biosphere reserves is required to assess the impact of the management effectiveness. This article assesses the changes in forest cover in various zones and protected areas of Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, the first declared biosphere reserve in India which forms part of Western Ghats-a global biodiversity hotspot. In this study, we have mapped the forests from earliest available topographical maps and multi-temporal satellite data spanning from 1920's to 2012 period. Mapping of spatial extent of forest cover, vegetation types and land cover was carried out using visual interpretation technique. A grid cell of 1 km × 1 km was generated for time series change analysis to understand the patterns in spatial distribution of forest cover (1920-1973-1989-1999-2006-2012). The total forest area of biosphere reserve was found to be 5,806.5 km(2) (93.8 % of total geographical area) in 1920. Overall loss of forest cover was estimated as 1,423.6 km(2) (24.5 % of the total forest) with reference to 1920. Among the six Protected Areas, annual deforestation rate of >0.5 was found in Wayanad wildlife sanctuary during 1920-1973. The deforestation in Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve is mainly attributed to conversion of forests to plantations and agriculture along with submergence due to construction of dams during 1920 to 1989. Grid wise analysis indicates that 851 grids have undergone large-scale negative changes of >75 ha of forest loss during 1920-1973 while, only 15 grids have shown >75 ha loss during 1973-1989. Annual net rate of deforestation for the period of 1920 to 1973 was calculated as 0.5 followed by 0.1 for 1973 to 1989. Our analysis shows that there was large-scale deforestation before the declaration of area as biosphere reserve in 1986; however, the deforestation has drastically reduced after the declaration due to high degree of protection, thus indicating the secure future of reserve in the long term under the current forest management practices. The present work will stand as the most up-to-date assessment on the forest cover of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve with immediate applications in monitoring and management of forest biodiversity.

Keeping it wild: mapping wilderness character in the United States

A GIS-based approach is developed to identify the state of wilderness character in US wilderness areas using Death Valley National Park (DEVA) as a case study. A set of indicators and measures are identified by DEVA staff and used as the basis for developing a flexible and broadly applicable framework to map wilderness character using data inputs selected by park staff. Spatial data and GIS methods are used to map the condition of four qualities of wilderness character: natural, untrammelled, undeveloped, and solitude or primitive and unconfined recreation. These four qualities are derived from the US 1964 Wilderness Act and later developed by Landres et al. (2008a) in "Keeping it Wild: An Interagency Strategy to Monitor Trends in Wilderness Character Across the National Wilderness Preservation System." Data inputs are weighted to reflect their importance in relation to other data inputs and the model is used to generate maps of each of the four qualities of wilderness character. The combined map delineates the range of quality of wilderness character in the DEVA wilderness revealing the majority of wilderness character to be optimal quality with the best areas in the northern section of the park. This map will serve as a baseline for monitoring change in wilderness character and for evaluating the spatial impacts of planning alternatives for wilderness and backcountry stewardship plans. The approach developed could be applied to any wilderness area, either in the USA or elsewhere in the world.

The race for space: tracking land-cover transformation in a socio-ecological landscape, South Africa

Biosphere Reserves attempt to align existing biodiversity conservation with sustainable resource use, specifically for improving socio-economic circumstances of resident communities. Typically, the Biosphere Reserve model is applied to an established landscape mosaic of existing land uses; these are often socio-ecological systems where strict environmental protection and community livelihoods are in conflict, and environmental degradation frequently accompanies "use". This raises challenges for successful implementation of the model, as the reality of the existing land-use mosaic undermines the theoretical aspirations of the Biosphere concept. This study focuses on the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve (K2C), South Africa; a socio-ecological landscape where formal conservation is juxtaposed against extensive impoverished rural communities. We focus on land-cover changes of the existing land-use mosaic (1993-2006), specifically selected land-cover classes identified as important for biodiversity conservation and local-level resource utilization. We discuss the implications of transformation for conservation, sustainable resource-use, and K2C's functioning as a "Biosphere Reserve". Spatially, changes radiated outward from the settlement expanse, with little regard for the theoretical land-use zonation of the Biosphere Reserve. Settlement growth tracked transport routes, transforming cohesive areas of communal-use rangelands. Given the interdependencies between the settlement population and local environmental resources, the Impacted Vegetation class expanded accordingly, fragmenting the Intact Vegetation class, and merging rangelands. This has serious implications for sustainability of communal harvesting areas, and further transformation of intact habitat. The distribution and magnitude of Intact Vegetation losses raise concerns around connectivity and edge effects, with long-term consequences for ecological integrity of remnant habitat, and K2C's existing network of protected areas.

Local residents perception of benefits and losses from protected areas in India and Nepal

High densities of people living around protected areas (PAs) in South Asia require management strategies to balance conservation goals and livelihood needs. Based on a survey of 777 households around five PAs in India and Nepal, this paper provides a comparative perspective of Indian and Nepali households' views of protected area benefits and costs, their attitude toward conservation in general, and attitude toward protected area staff. Results indicate mixed responses towards tourism, varying from very favorable in Nepal to less favorable in India. The majority (81%) held positive attitudes towards the existence and importance of PAs but had negative perceptions of PA staff (69%). Most residents perceived benefits from access to fuel wood, fodder and other PA resources including benefits from tourism, while crop and livestock losses from wildlife were the main costs. Households overall positive attitudes towards the PAs and conservation despite high losses from living around PAs suggests that local residents may support conservation if their livelihood needs are met. Comparisons of household attitudes and perceptions suggest that locally based strategies rather than top-down approaches are likely to be more effective. Extending PA benefits to smaller landholders, households that are highly resource-dependent or experiencing higher income losses from human-wildlife conflicts, and less educated residents are particularly important to balance costs and losses from living around protected areas.

A climatic stability approach to prioritizing global conservation investments

Climate change is impacting species and ecosystems globally. Many existing templates to identify the most important areas to conserve terrestrial biodiversity at the global scale neglect the future impacts of climate change. Unstable climatic conditions are predicted to undermine conservation investments in the future. This paper presents an approach to developing a resource allocation algorithm for conservation investment that incorporates the ecological stability of ecoregions under climate change. We discover that allocating funds in this way changes the optimal schedule of global investments both spatially and temporally. This allocation reduces the biodiversity loss of terrestrial endemic species from protected areas due to climate change by 22% for the period of 2002–2052, when compared to allocations that do not consider climate change. To maximize the resilience of global biodiversity to climate change we recommend that funding be increased in ecoregions located in the tropics and/or mid-elevation habitats, where climatic conditions are predicted to remain relatively stable. Accounting for the ecological stability of ecoregions provides a realistic approach to incorporating climate change into global conservation planning, with potential to save more species from extinction in the long term.

Reassessing the forest impacts of protection: the challenge of nonrandom location and a corrective method

Protected areas are leading tools in efforts to slow global species loss and appear also to have a role in climate change policy. Understanding their impacts on deforestation informs environmental policies. We review several approaches to evaluating protection's impact on deforestation, given three hurdles to empirical evaluation, and note that "matching" techniques from economic impact evaluation address those hurdles. The central hurdle derives from the fact that protected areas are distributed nonrandomly across landscapes. Nonrandom location can be intentional, and for good reasons, including biological and political ones. Yet even so, when protected areas are biased in their locations toward less-threatened areas, many methods for impact evaluation will overestimate protection's effect. The use of matching techniques allows one to control for known landscape biases when inferring the impact of protection. Applications of matching have revealed considerably lower impact estimates of forest protection than produced by other methods. A reduction in the estimated impact from existing parks does not suggest, however, that protection is unable to lower clearing. Rather, it indicates the importance of variation across locations in how much impact protection could possibly have on rates of deforestation. Matching, then, bundles improved estimates of the average impact of protection with guidance on where new parks' impacts will be highest. While many factors will determine where new protected areas will be sited in the future, we claim that the variation across space in protection's impact on deforestation rates should inform site choice.

The effects of governmental protected areas and social initiatives for land protection on the conservation of Mexican amphibians

Traditionally, biodiversity conservation gap analyses have been focused on governmental protected areas (PAs). However, an increasing number of social initiatives in conservation (SICs) are promoting a new perspective for analysis. SICs include all of the efforts that society implements to conserve biodiversity, such as land protection, from private reserves to community zoning plans some of which have generated community-protected areas. This is the first attempt to analyze the status of conservation in Latin America when some of these social initiatives are included. The analyses were focused on amphibians because they are one of the most threatened groups worldwide. Mexico is not an exception, where more than 60% of its amphibians are endemic. We used a niche model approach to map the potential and real geographical distribution (extracting the transformed areas) of the endemic amphibians. Based on remnant distribution, all the species have suffered some degree of loss, but 36 species have lost more than 50% of their potential distribution. For 50 micro-endemic species we could not model their potential distribution range due to the small number of records per species, therefore the analyses were performed using these records directly. We then evaluated the efficiency of the existing set of governmental protected areas and established the contribution of social initiatives (private and community) for land protection for amphibian conservation. We found that most of the species have some proportion of their potential ecological niche distribution protected, but 20% are not protected at all within governmental PAs. 73% of endemic and 26% of micro-endemic amphibians are represented within SICs. However, 30 micro-endemic species are not represented within either governmental PAs or SICs. This study shows how the role of land conservation through social initiatives is therefore becoming a crucial element for an important number of species not protected by governmental PAs.

Changing governance of the world's forests

Major features of contemporary forest governance include decentralization of forest management, logging concessions in publicly owned commercially valuable forests, and timber certification, primarily in temperate forests. Although a majority of forests continue to be owned formally by governments, the effectiveness of forest governance is increasingly independent of formal ownership. Growing and competing demands for food, biofuels, timber, and environmental services will pose severe challenges to effective forest governance in the future, especially in conjunction with the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. A greater role for community and market actors in forest governance and deeper attention to the factors that lead to effective governance, beyond ownership patterns, is necessary to address future forest governance challenges.

Implications of land use/land cover change in the buffer zone of a national park in the tropical Andes

The impacts of land use and land cover (LULC) change in buffer zones surrounding protected ecological reserves have important implications for the management and conservation of these protected areas. This study examines the spatial and temporal patterns of LULC change along the boundary of Rio Abiseo National Park in the Northern Peruvian Andes. Landscape change within four ecological zones was evaluated based on trends expected to occur between 1987 and 2001. Landsat TM and ETM imagery were used to produce LULC classification maps for both years using a hybrid supervised/unsupervised approach. LULC changes were measured using landscape metrics and from-to change maps created by post-classification change detection. Contrary to expectations, tropical upper wet montane forest increased despite being threatened by human-induced fires and cattle grazing of the highland grasslands inside the park. Within the park's buffer zone, tropical moist forest remnants were fragmented into more numerous and smaller patches between 1987 and 2001; this was in part due to conversion into agricultural land. The methods used in this study provide an effective way to monitor LULC change detection and support the management of protected areas and their surrounding environments.