Maximizing the ecological contribution of conservation banks

In 1995, California established the first conservation banking program in the United States to provide a new financial mechanism to conserve wildlife and natural communities in rapidly developing regions. Conservation banks are lands protected and managed for conservation of species of concern. Developers may purchase species credits from a conservation bank to offset adverse impacts of development at another site. Conservation banks facilitate pooling of mitigation resources from multiple development projects to protect planned habitat reserves of greater ecological value than can be achieved with project-byproject mitigation. In this study, we conducted the first ever assessment of the ecological performance of the California Conservation Banking Program. Specifically, we investigated to what extent conservation banks contribute to achieving regional conservation objectives.We hypothesized that conservation banks within a region should have similarly high ecological values if they are appropriately evaluated and prioritized based on principles of conservation planning. We created a new ecological value metric to evaluate and rank conservation banks and used it to compare potential conservation banks or reserves within a region. We found the ecological value of banks within regions varied and concluded that maximizing the ecological contribution of conservation banks requires prioritization of lands for potential bank sites and reserves. Our analysis identified circumstances where conservation banking is not an appropriate mitigation mechanism to protect rare species and natural communities. We concluded that limited funding for conservation planning should be directed toward regions where species of concern are wide-ranging, biodiversity is highly variable, threats to species of concern are highly varied, and there are many potential conservation bank sites. © 2013 The Wildlife Society

Toward responsible stock enhancement: broadcast spawning dynamics and adaptive genetic management in white seabass aquaculture

The evolutionary effects captive-bred individuals that can have on wild conspecifics are necessary considerations for stock enhancement programs, but breeding protocols are often developed without the knowledge of realized reproductive behavior. To help fill that gap, parentage was assigned to offspring produced by a freely mating group of 50 white seabass (Atractoscion nobilis), a representative broadcast spawning marine finfish cultured for conservation. Similar to the well-known and closely related red drum (Sciaenops ocellatus), A. nobilis exhibited large variation in reproductive success. More males contributed and contributed more equally than females within and among spawns in a mating system best described as lottery polygyny. Two females produced 27% of the seasonal offspring pool and female breeding effective size averaged 1.85 per spawn and 12.38 seasonally, whereas male breeding effective size was higher (6.42 and 20.87, respectively), with every male contributing 1–7% of offspring. Further, females batch spawned every 1–5 weeks, while males displayed continuous reproductive readiness. Sex-specific mating strategies resulted in multiple successful mate pairings and a breeding effective to census size ratio of ≥0.62. Understanding a depleted species’ mating system allowed management to more effectively utilize parental genetic variability for culture, but the fitness consequences of long-term stocking can be difficult to address

Can Orchards Help Connect Mediterranean Ecosystems? Animal Movement Data Alter Conservation Priorities

As natural habitats become fragmented by human activities, animals must increasingly move through human-dominated systems, particularly agricultural landscapes. Mapping areas important for animal movement has therefore become a key part of conservation planning. Models of landscape connectivity are often parameterized using expert opinion and seldom distinguish between the risks and barriers presented by different crop types. Recent research, however, suggests different crop types, such as row crops and orchards, differ in the degree to which they facilitate or impede species movements. Like many mammalian carnivores, bobcats (Lynx rufus) are sensitive to fragmentation and loss of connectivity between habitat patches. We investigated how distinguishing between different agricultural land covers might change conclusions about the relative conservation importance of different land uses in a Mediterranean ecosystem. Bobcats moved relatively quickly in row crops but relatively slowly in orchards, at rates similar to those in natural habitats of woodlands and scrub. We found that parameterizing a connectivity model using empirical data on bobcat movements in agricultural lands and other land covers, instead of parameterizing the model using habitat suitability indices based on expert opinion, altered locations of predicted animal movement routes. These results emphasize that differentiating between types of agriculture can alter conservation planning outcomes

Striking a balance between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic viability in the design of marine protected areas

The establishment of marine protected areas is often viewed as a conflict between conservation and fishing. We considered consumptive and nonconsumptive interests of multiple stakeholders (i.e., fishers, scuba divers, conservationists, managers, scientists) in the systematic design of a network of marine protected areas along California's central coast in the context of the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative. With advice from managers, administrators, and scientists, a representative group of stakeholders defined biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic goals that accommodated social needs and conserved marine ecosystems, consistent with legal requirements. To satisfy biodiversity goals, we targeted 11 marine habitats across 5 depth zones, areas of high species diversity, and areas containing species of special status. We minimized adverse socioeconomic impacts by minimizing negative effects on fishers. We included fine-scale fishing data from the recreational and commercial fishing sectors across 24 fisheries. Protected areas designed with consideration of commercial and recreational fisheries reduced potential impact to the fisheries approximately 21% more than protected areas designed without consideration of fishing effort and resulted in a small increase in the total area protected (approximately 3.4%). We incorporated confidential fishing data without revealing the identity of specific fisheries or individual fishing grounds. We sited a portion of the protected areas near land parks, marine laboratories, and scientific monitoring sites to address nonconsumptive socioeconomic goals. Our results show that a stakeholder-driven design process can use systematic conservation-planning methods to successfully produce options for network design that satisfy multiple conservation and socioeconomic objectives. Marine protected areas that incorporate multiple stakeholder interests without compromising biodiversity conservation goals are more likely to protect marine ecosystems

Effectiveness of marine reserve networks in representing biodiversity and minimizing impact to fishermen: a comparison of two approaches used in California

We compared the effectiveness of marine reserve networks designed using a numerical optimization tool with networks designed by stakeholders during the course of California's Marine Life Protection Act Initiative at representing biodiversity and minimizing estimated negative impacts to fishermen. We used the same spatial data representing biodiversity and recreational fishing effort that were used by the stakeholders to design marine reserves. In addition, we used commercial fishing data not explicitly available to the stakeholders. Networks of marine reserves designed with numerical optimization tools represented the same amount of each habitat, or more, and had less of an estimated impact on commercial and recreational fisheries than networks designed by the stakeholders. The networks designed by the stakeholders could have represented 2.0–9.5% more of each habitat with no additional impact on the fisheries. Of four different marine reserve proposals considered in the initiative, the proposal designed by fishermen was more efficient than the proposals designed by other stakeholder groups at representing biodiversity and minimizing impact to the fishing industry. These results highlight the necessity of using comprehensive information on fishing effort to design a reserve network that efficiently minimizes negative socioeconomic impacts. We recommend that numerical optimization tools support, not replace, the stakeholder-driven reserve design process along California's northern and southern coasts to help accomplish two of the initiative's core objectives: (1) Protect representative and unique marine habitats, and (2) Minimize negative socioeconomic impacts. The involvement of stakeholders is necessary as additional factors important to reserve design can not be considered using a numerical optimization tool