Effectiveness of protected areas in conserving tropical forest birds.

Protected areas (PAs) are the cornerstones of global biodiversity conservation efforts, but to fulfil this role they must be effective at conserving the ecosystems and species that occur within their boundaries. Adequate monitoring datasets that allow comparing biodiversity between protected and unprotected sites are lacking in tropical regions. Here we use the largest citizen science biodiversity dataset - eBird - to quantify the extent to which protected areas in eight tropical forest biodiversity hotspots are effective at retaining bird diversity. We find generally positive effects of protection on the diversity of bird species that are forest-dependent, endemic to the hotspots, or threatened or Near Threatened, but not on overall bird species richness. Furthermore, we show that in most of the hotspots examined this benefit is driven by protected areas preventing both forest loss and degradation. Our results provide evidence that, on average, protected areas contribute measurably to conserving bird species in some of the world's most diverse and threatened terrestrial ecosystems

Bridging the research-implementation gap in IUCN Red List assessments

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species is central in biodiversity conservation, but insufficient resources hamper its long-term growth, updating, and consistency. Models or automated calculations can alleviate those challenges by providing standardised estimates required for assessments, or prioritising species for (re-)assessments. However, while numerous scientific papers have proposed such methods, few have been integrated into assessment practice, highlighting a critical research-implementation gap. We believe this gap can be bridged by fostering communication and collaboration between academic researchers and Red List practitioners, and by developing and maintaining user-friendly platforms to automate application of the methods. We propose that developing methods better encompassing Red List criteria, systems, and drivers is the next priority to support the Red List.Peer reviewe

Accelerating and standardising IUCN Red List assessments with sRedList

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species underpins much decision-making in conservation and plays a key role in monitoring the status and trends of biodiversity. However, the shortage of funds and assessor capacity slows the uptake of novel data and techniques, hampering its currency, applicability, consistency and long-term viability. To help address this, we developed sRedList, a user-friendly online platform that assists Red List assessors through a step-by-step process to estimate key parameters in a standardised and reproducible fashion. Through the platform, assessors can swiftly generate outputs including species' range maps, lists of countries of occurrence, lower and upper bounds of area of occupancy, habitat preferences, trends in area of habitat, and levels of fragmentation. sRedList is compliant with the IUCN Red List guidelines and outputs are interoperable with the Species Information Service (SIS; the IUCN Red List database) in support of global, regional and national assessments and reassessments. sRedList can also help assessors prioritise species for reassessment. sRedList was released in October 2023, with a complete documentation package (including text documentation, ‘cheatsheets’, and 15 video tutorials), and will soon be highlighted in the official Red List online training course. sRedList will help to bridge the gap between extinction risk research and Red List assessment practice, increase the taxonomic coverage and consistency of assessments, and ensure the IUCN Red List is up-to-date to best support conservation policy and practice across the world

Effectiveness of Protected Areas : is the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation really enabling the protection of nature ?

Les espoirs de stopper la crise actuelle de biodiversité reposent principalement sur les aires protégées, qui visent à écarter ou restreindre les activités humaines de ces sites. Malgré le rôle central que jouent les aires protégées dans les stratégies de conservation de la biodiversité, les études mesurant leur efficacité réelle à limiter la perte de biodiversité restent rares. Mesurer cette différence n’est pas si évident qu’il y paraît puisque cela nécessite de comparer la biodiversité de sites protégés et de sites témoins non-protégés (qui ne diffèrent que par leur statut de protection) et requiert donc l’utilisation de gros jeux de données, qui sont rares. Dans cette thèse, j’utilise plusieurs jeux de données publics, principalement issus de programmes de sciences participatives, pour mesurer l’efficacité des aires protégées. Dans le premier chapitre, j’utilise des données d’abondance d’oiseaux issues de la « North American Breeding Bird Survey » et je montre que les aires protégées n’ont pas d’effet sur la richesse spécifique ou l’abondance totale mais qu’elles favorisent les espèces spécialistes. Dans le second chapitre, je me concentre sur les forêts tropicales de huit points chauds de biodiversité et j’utilise les données eBird pour montrer que les aires protégées ralentissent les déclins d’espèces d’oiseaux dépendantes des forêts, endémiques et menacées. De plus, je montre que cet effet sur les oiseaux est induit par le double effet qu’ont les aires protégées sur la réduction de la déforestation et de la dégradation de la forêt. Dans le troisième chapitre, je modélise la sensibilité à la pression humaine de chaque espèce d’oiseaux se reproduisant en Amérique et j’explore la capacité du réseau d’aires protégées à conserver les espèces les plus sensibles. Je montre que les zones où les espèces sont très sensibles (principalement dans les tropiques) sont souvent trop peu couvertes par des aires protégées intactes, laissant de nombreuses espèces sensibles sans aucun habitat protégé intact sur l’ensemble de leur aire de répartition. Enfin, dans le quatrième chapitre, j’interroge l’effet que peuvent avoir les aires protégées sur les comportements humains, en montrant que les habitants de municipalités françaises qui sont proches de parcs naturels adoptent plus de comportements pro-environnementaux. Dans leur ensemble, ces travaux de thèse soutiennent que les aires protégées peuvent constituer un outil efficace pour conserver la biodiversité et soulignent l’importance et la complexité de mesurer leur efficacité.Humanity’s main hope to halt the ongoing dramatic biodiversity declines is to buffer and restrict human activities from some sites, called protected areas. Despite the central role that protected areas have in biodiversity conservation strategies, there have been surprisingly few studies evaluating their practical effects in terms of avoiding biodiversity loss. Measuring the difference protected areas make is challenging, as it requires substantial datasets that enable comparing biodiversity from protected versus unprotected counterfactual sites (differing only in their protection status). In this thesis, I take advantage of extensive publicly available datasets, mainly from citizen science programs, to measure the effectiveness of protected areas. In the first chapter, I use bird data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey and show that protected areas do not increase overall species richness or abundance but that they favour specialist species. In the second chapter, I focus on tropical forests from eight biodiversity hotpots and use eBird data (a global network of bird observations) to show that protected areas mitigate declines from forest-dependent, endemic, and threatened species. I additionally show that this positive effect on birds is due to the mitigating effect that protected areas have on both forest loss and forest degradation. In the third chapter, I model the sensitivity to human pressure of all bird species breeding in the Americas and explore the ability of the protected area network to conserve the most sensitive species. I show that protected area intactness is not higher where species need it the most, leaving many high-sensitivity species with null coverage of their distribution by intact protected habitats. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I question the effects that protected areas can have on human behaviours, showing that inhabitants from municipalities that are located close to natural parks in France are more likely to adopt pro-environmental behaviours. Globally, this thesis emphasises that protected areas can be an effective tool to conserve biodiversity and highlights the need to, and the complexity of, measuring their effectiveness

Efficacité des aires protégées : la pierre angulaire de la conservation de la biodiversité permet-elle réellement de protéger la nature ?

Humanity’s main hope to halt the ongoing dramatic biodiversity declines is to buffer and restrict human activities from some sites, called protected areas. Despite the central role that protected areas have in biodiversity conservation strategies, there have been surprisingly few studies evaluating their practical effects in terms of avoiding biodiversity loss. Measuring the difference protected areas make is challenging, as it requires substantial datasets that enable comparing biodiversity from protected versus unprotected counterfactual sites (differing only in their protection status). In this thesis, I take advantage of extensive publicly available datasets, mainly from citizen science programs, to measure the effectiveness of protected areas. In the first chapter, I use bird data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey and show that protected areas do not increase overall species richness or abundance but that they favour specialist species. In the second chapter, I focus on tropical forests from eight biodiversity hotpots and use eBird data (a global network of bird observations) to show that protected areas mitigate declines from forest-dependent, endemic, and threatened species. I additionally show that this positive effect on birds is due to the mitigating effect that protected areas have on both forest loss and forest degradation. In the third chapter, I model the sensitivity to human pressure of all bird species breeding in the Americas and explore the ability of the protected area network to conserve the most sensitive species. I show that protected area intactness is not higher where species need it the most, leaving many high-sensitivity species with null coverage of their distribution by intact protected habitats. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I question the effects that protected areas can have on human behaviours, showing that inhabitants from municipalities that are located close to natural parks in France are more likely to adopt pro-environmental behaviours. Globally, this thesis emphasises that protected areas can be an effective tool to conserve biodiversity and highlights the need to, and the complexity of, measuring their effectiveness.Les espoirs de stopper la crise actuelle de biodiversité reposent principalement sur les aires protégées, qui visent à écarter ou restreindre les activités humaines de ces sites. Malgré le rôle central que jouent les aires protégées dans les stratégies de conservation de la biodiversité, les études mesurant leur efficacité réelle à limiter la perte de biodiversité restent rares. Mesurer cette différence n’est pas si évident qu’il y paraît puisque cela nécessite de comparer la biodiversité de sites protégés et de sites témoins non-protégés (qui ne diffèrent que par leur statut de protection) et requiert donc l’utilisation de gros jeux de données, qui sont rares. Dans cette thèse, j’utilise plusieurs jeux de données publics, principalement issus de programmes de sciences participatives, pour mesurer l’efficacité des aires protégées. Dans le premier chapitre, j’utilise des données d’abondance d’oiseaux issues de la « North American Breeding Bird Survey » et je montre que les aires protégées n’ont pas d’effet sur la richesse spécifique ou l’abondance totale mais qu’elles favorisent les espèces spécialistes. Dans le second chapitre, je me concentre sur les forêts tropicales de huit points chauds de biodiversité et j’utilise les données eBird pour montrer que les aires protégées ralentissent les déclins d’espèces d’oiseaux dépendantes des forêts, endémiques et menacées. De plus, je montre que cet effet sur les oiseaux est induit par le double effet qu’ont les aires protégées sur la réduction de la déforestation et de la dégradation de la forêt. Dans le troisième chapitre, je modélise la sensibilité à la pression humaine de chaque espèce d’oiseaux se reproduisant en Amérique et j’explore la capacité du réseau d’aires protégées à conserver les espèces les plus sensibles. Je montre que les zones où les espèces sont très sensibles (principalement dans les tropiques) sont souvent trop peu couvertes par des aires protégées intactes, laissant de nombreuses espèces sensibles sans aucun habitat protégé intact sur l’ensemble de leur aire de répartition. Enfin, dans le quatrième chapitre, j’interroge l’effet que peuvent avoir les aires protégées sur les comportements humains, en montrant que les habitants de municipalités françaises qui sont proches de parcs naturels adoptent plus de comportements pro-environnementaux. Dans leur ensemble, ces travaux de thèse soutiennent que les aires protégées peuvent constituer un outil efficace pour conserver la biodiversité et soulignent l’importance et la complexité de mesurer leur efficacité

The multifaceted challenge of evaluating protected area effectiveness

International audienceProtected areas (PAs) are the most important conservation tool, yet assessing their effectiveness is remarkably challenging. We clarify the links between the many facets of PA effectiveness, from evaluating the means, to analysing the mechanisms, to directly measuring biodiversity outcomes

Are protected areas effective in conserving human connection with nature and enhancing pro-environmental behaviours?

International audienceHalting the ongoing biodiversity crisis requires large individual behavioural changes through the implementation of more pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs) by every citizen. People's experiences of nature, such as outdoor activities, have been identified as great enhancers of such behaviours. Yet, these experiences of nature got scarcer in the last decades, due to an increased spatial segregation between human and nature, particularly in societies that follow a Western way of life. In this context, we wondered if protected areas (PAs), because they offer more opportunities for people to be in contact with natural landscapes and offer more ecological information and governance than other places, could enlarge the implementation of PEBs for people living in or close from them. We addressed this question by modelling the link between three types of PEBs in Metropolitan France (i.e., voting for Green party candidates, joining or donating to biodiversity conservation NGOs and participating in a biodiversity monitoring citizen science program) and the proximity to large PAs. Innovatively, we addressed this question at national level, with exhaustive data collected in more than 16,000 French municipalities with more than 500 inhabitants. All models controlled for difference in population size, average income and proportion of retired people between municipalities. We found that each of the studied PEBs decreased with distance of the municipality to PAs, even after having controlled by the naturalness of municipalities' surroundings. Our results suggest that, beyond their effect through exposure to natural landscapes, PAs affect PEBs by the institutional context they create. Additionally, PEBs were higher inside PAs than in close surroundings, suggesting that, besides restrictions brought by PAs on inhabitants, a fraction of the population responds positively to their implementation. Our results suggest that PAs can play a role in enhancing environmental friendly ways of life by conserving human's connection with nature

Using a large-scale biodiversity monitoring dataset to test the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving North- American breeding birds

Protected areas currently cover about 15% of the global land area, and constitute one of the main tools in biodiversity conservation. Quantifying their effectiveness at protecting species from local decline or extinction involves comparing protected with counterfactual unprotected sites representing "what would have happened to protected sites had they not been protected". Most studies are based on pairwise comparisons, using neighbour sites to protected areas as counterfactuals, but this choice is often subjective and may be prone to biases. An alternative is to use large-scale biodiversity monitoring datasets, whereby the effect of protected areas is analysed statistically by controlling for landscape differences between protected and unprotected sites, allowing a more targeted and clearly defined measure of the protected areas effect. Here we use the North American Breeding Bird Survey dataset as a case study to investigate the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving bird assemblages. We analysed the effect of protected areas on species richness, on assemblage-level abundance, and on the abundance of individual species by modelling how these metrics relate to the proportion of each site that is protected, while controlling for local habitat, altitude, productivity and for spatial autocorrelation. At the assemblage level, we found almost no relationship between protection and species richness or overall abundance. At the species level, we found that forest species are present in significantly higher abundances within protected forest sites, compared with unprotected forests, with the opposite effect for species that favour open habitats. Hence, even though protected forest assemblages are not richer than those of unprotected forests, they are more typical of this habitat. We also found some evidence that species that avoid human activities tend to be favoured by protection, but found no such effect for regionally declining species. Our results highlight the complexity of assessing protected areas effecti veness, and the necessity of clearly defining the metrics of effectiveness and the controls used in such assessments

Do we have to choose between feeding the human population and conserving nature? Modelling the global dependence of people on ecosystem services

International audienceThe ability of the human population to continue growing depends strongly on the ecosystem services provided by nature. Nature, however, is becoming more and more degraded as the number of individuals increases, which could potentially threaten the future well-being of the human population. We use a dynamic model to conceptualise links between the global proportion of natural habitats and human demography, through four categories of ecosystem services (provisioning, regulating, cultural recreational and informational) to investigate the common future of nature and humanity in terms of size and well-being. Our model shows that there is generally a trade-off between the quality of life and human population size and identifies four short-term scenarios, corresponding to three long-term steady states of the model. First, human population could experience declines if nature becomes too degraded and regulating services diminish; second the majority of the population could be in a famine state, where the population continues to grow with minimal food provision. Between these scenarios, a desirable future scenario emerges from the model. It occurs if humans convert enough land to feed all the population, while maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services. Finally, we find a fourth scenario, which combines famine and a decline in the population because of an overexploitation of land leading to a decrease in food production. Human demography is embedded in natural dynamics; the two factors should be considered together if we are to identify a desirable future for both nature and humans

Using a large-scale biodiversity monitoring dataset to test the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving North-American breeding birds

International audienceProtected areas currently cover about 15% of the global land area, and constitute one of the main tools in biodiversity conservation. Quantifying their effectiveness at protecting species from local decline or extinction involves comparing protected with counterfactual unprotected sites representing “what would have happened to protected sites had they not been protected”. Most studies are based on pairwise comparisons, using neighbour sites to protected areas as counterfactuals, but this choice is often subjective and may be prone to biases. An alternative is to use large-scale biodiversity monitoring datasets, whereby the effect of protected areas is analysed statistically by controlling for landscape differences between protected and unprotected sites, allowing a more targeted and clearly defined measure of the protected areas effect. Here we use the North American Breeding Bird Survey dataset as a case study to investigate the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving bird assemblages. We analysed the effect of protected areas on species richness, on assemblage-level abundance, and on the abundance of individual species by modelling how these metrics relate to the proportion of each site that is protected, while controlling for local habitat, altitude, productivity and for spatial autocorrelation. At the assemblage level, we found almost no relationship between protection and species richness or overall abundance. At the species level, we found that forest species are present in significantly higher abundances within protected forest sites, compared with unprotected forests, with the opposite effect for species that favour open habitats. Hence, even though protected forest assemblages are not richer than those of unprotected forests, they are more typical of this habitat. We also found some evidence that species that avoid human activities tend to be favoured by protection, but found no such effect for regionally declining species. Our results highlight the complexity of assessing protected areas effectiveness, and the necessity of clearly defining the metrics of effectiveness and the controls used in such assessments