Potential of Best Practice to Reduce Impacts from Oil and Gas Projects in the Amazon

The western Amazon continues to be an active and controversial zone of hydrocarbon exploration and production. We argue for the urgent need to implement best practices to reduce the negative environmental and social impacts associated with the sector. Here, we present a three-part study aimed at resolving the major obstacles impeding the advancement of best practice in the region. Our focus is on Loreto, Peru, one of the largest and most dynamic hydrocarbon zones in the Amazon. First, we develop a set of specific best practice guidelines to address the lack of clarity surrounding the issue. These guidelines incorporate both engineering-based criteria and key ecological and social factors. Second, we provide a detailed analysis of existing and planned hydrocarbon activities and infrastructure, overcoming the lack of information that typically hampers large-scale impact analysis. Third, we evaluate the planned activities and infrastructure with respect to the best practice guidelines. We show that Loreto is an extremely active hydrocarbon front, highlighted by a number of recent oil and gas discoveries and a sustained government push for increased exploration. Our analyses reveal that the use of technical best practice could minimize future impacts by greatly reducing the amount of required infrastructure such as drilling platforms and access roads. We also document a critical need to consider more fully the ecological and social factors, as the vast majority of planned infrastructure overlaps sensitive areas such as protected areas, indigenous territories, and key ecosystems and watersheds. Lastly, our cost analysis indicates that following best practice does not impose substantially greater costs than conventional practice, and may in fact reduce overall costs. Barriers to the widespread implementation of best practice in the Amazon clearly exist, but our findings show that there can be great benefits to its implementation

Strategic protection of landslide vulnerable mountains for biodiversity conservation under land-cover and climate change impacts

Natural disasters impose huge uncertainty and loss to human lives and economic activities. Landslides are one disaster that has become more prevalent because of anthropogenic disturbances, such as land-cover changes, land degradation, and expansion of infrastructure. These are further exacerbated by more extreme precipitation due to climate change, which is predicted to trigger more landslides and threaten sustainable development in vulnerable regions. Although biodiversity conservation and development are often regarded as having a trade-off relationship, here we present a global analysis of the area with co-benefits, where conservation through expanding protection and reducing deforestation can not only benefit biodiversity but also reduce landslide risks to human society. High overlap exists between landslide susceptibility and areas of endemism for mammals, birds, and amphibians, which are mostly concentrated in mountain regions. We identified 247 mountain ranges as areas with high vulnerability, having both exceptional biodiversity and landslide risks, accounting for 25.8% of the global mountainous areas. Another 31 biodiverse mountains are classified as future vulnerable mountains as they face increasing landslide risks because of predicted climate change and deforestation. None of these 278 mountains reach the Aichi Target 11 of 17% coverage by protected areas. Of the 278 mountains, 52 need immediate actions because of high vulnerability, severe threats from future deforestation and precipitation extremes, low protection, and high-population density and anthropogenic activities. These actions include protected area expansion, forest conservation, and restoration where it could be a cost-effective way to reduce the risks of landslides

How to protect half of Earth to ensure it protects sufficient biodiversity

It is theoretically possible to protect large fractions of species in relatively small regions. For plants, 85% of species occur entirely within just over a third of the Earth’s land surface, carefully optimized to maximize the species captured. Well-known vertebrate taxa show similar patterns. Protecting half of Earth might not be necessary, but would it be sufficient given the current trends of protection? The predilection of national governments is to protect areas that are “wild,” that is, typically remote, cold, or arid. Unfortunately, those areas often hold relatively few species. Wild places likely afford the easier opportunities for the future expansion of protected areas, with the expansion into human-dominated landscapes the greater challenge. We identify regions that are not currently protected, but that are wild, and consider which of them hold substantial numbers of especially small-ranged vertebrate species. We assess how successful the strategy of protecting the wilder half of Earth might be in conserving biodiversity. It is far from sufficient. (Protecting large wild places for reasons other than biodiversity protection, such as carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services, might still have importance.) Unexpectedly, we also show that, despite the bias in establishing large protected areas in wild places to date, numerous small protected areas are in biodiverse places. They at least partially protect significant fractions of especially small-ranged species. So, while a preoccupation with protecting large areas for the sake of getting half of Earth might achieve little for biodiversity, there is more progress in protecting high-biodiversity areas than currently appreciated. Continuing to prioritize the right parts of Earth, not just the total area protected, is what matters for biodiversity

The impacts of oil palm on recent deforestation and biodiversity loss

Palm oil is the most widely traded vegetable oil globally, with demand projected to increase substantially in the future. Almost all oil palm grows in areas that were once tropical moist forests, some of them quite recently. The conversion to date, and future expansion, threatens biodiversity and increases greenhouse gas emissions. Today, consumer pressure is pushing companies toward deforestation-free sources of palm oil. To guide interventions aimed at reducing tropical deforestation due to oil palm, we analysed recent expansions and modelled likely future ones. We assessed sample areas to find where oil palm plantations have recently replaced forests in 20 countries, using a combination of high-resolution imagery from Google Earth and Landsat. We then compared these trends to countrywide trends in FAO data for oil palm planted area. Finally, we assessed which forests have high agricultural suitability for future oil palm development, which we refer to as vulnerable forests, and identified critical areas for biodiversity that oil palm expansion threatens. Our analysis reveals regional trends in deforestation associated with oil palm agriculture. In Southeast Asia, 45% of sampled oil palm plantations came from areas that were forests in 1989. For South America, the percentage was 31%. By contrast, in Mesoamerica and Africa, we observed only 2% and 7% of oil palm plantations coming from areas that were forest in 1989. The largest areas of vulnerable forest are in Africa and South America. Vulnerable forests in all four regions of production contain globally high concentrations of mammal and bird species at risk of extinction. However, priority areas for biodiversity conservation differ based on taxa and criteria used. Government regulation and voluntary market interventions can help incentivize the expansion of oil palm plantations in ways that protect biodiversity-rich ecosystems

Logging Concessions Enable Illegal Logging Crisis in the Peruvian Amazon

The Peruvian Amazon is an important arena in global efforts to promote sustainable logging in the tropics. Despite recent efforts to achieve sustainability, such as provisions in the US–Peru Trade Promotion Agreement, illegal logging continues to plague the region. We present evidence that Peru\u27s legal logging concession system is enabling the widespread illegal logging via the regulatory documents designed to ensure sustainable logging. Analyzing official government data, we found that 68.3% of all concessions supervised by authorities were suspected of major violations. Of the 609 total concessions, nearly 30% have been cancelled for violations and we expect this percentage to increase as investigations continue. Moreover, the nature of the violations indicate that the permits associated with legal concessions are used to harvest trees in unauthorized areas, thus threatening all forested areas. Many of the violations pertain to the illegal extraction of CITES-listed timber species outside authorized areas. These findings highlight the need for additional reforms

Sentiment Analysis of Conservation Studies Captures Successes of Species Reintroductions

Learning from the rapidly growing body of scientific articles is constrained by human bandwidth. Existing methods in machine learning have been developed to extract knowledge from human language and may automate this process. Here, we apply sentiment analysis, a type of natural language processing, to facilitate a literature review in reintroduction biology. We analyzed 1,030,558 words from 4,313 scientific abstracts published over four decades using four previously trained lexicon-based models and one recursive neural tensor network model. We find frequently used terms share both a general and a domain-specific value, with either positive (success, protect, growth) or negative (threaten, loss, risk) sentiment. Sentiment trends suggest that reintroduction studies have become less variable and increasingly successful over time and seem to capture known successes and challenges for conservation biology. This approach offers promise for rapidly extracting explicit and latent information from a large corpus of scientific texts

Patterns of Vertebrate Diversity and Protection in Brazil

Most conservation decisions take place at national or finer spatial scales. Providing useful information at such decision-making scales is essential for guiding the practice of conservation. Brazil is one of the world’s megadiverse countries, and consequently decisions about conservation in the country have a disproportionate impact on the survival of global biodiversity. For three groups of terrestrial vertebrates (birds, mammals, and amphibians), we examined geographic patterns of diversity and protection in Brazil, including that of endemic, small-ranged, and threatened species. To understand potential limitations of the data, we also explored how spatial bias in collection localities may influence the perceived patterns of diversity. The highest overall species richness is in the Amazon and Atlantic Forests, while the Atlantic Forest dominates in terms of country endemics and small-ranged species. Globally threatened species do not present a consistent pattern. Patterns for birds were similar to overall species richness, with higher concentrations of threatened species in the Atlantic Forest, while mammals show a more generalized pattern across the country and a high concentration in the Amazon. Few amphibians are listed as threatened, mostly in the Atlantic Forest. Data deficient mammals occur across the country, concentrating in the Amazon and southeast Atlantic Forest, and there are no data deficient birds in Brazil. In contrast, nearly a third of amphibians are data deficient, widespread across the country, but with a high concentration in the far southeast. Spatial biases in species locality data, however, possibly influence the perceived patterns of biodiversity. Regions with low sampling density need more biological studies, as do the many data deficient species. All biomes except the Amazon have less than 3% of their area under full protection. Reassuringly though, rates of protection do correlate with higher biodiversity, including higher levels of threatened and small-ranged species. Our results indicate a need for expanded formal protection in Brazil, especially in the Atlantic forest, and with an emphasis on fully protected areas

Use of small Atlantic Forest fragments by birds in Southeast Brazil

Small forest fragments may play a major role in fragmented areas, but there is scarce empirical data to test this hypothesis. To understand in which context birds can use small Atlantic Forest fragments, we tested the presence of 11 bird species in 30 small fragments (4–10 ha), in a range of matrices (eucalyptus-pasture), and in different landscape configurations. The results showed that landscape composition is a good predictor for presence of birds in small fragments and their use can be further associated with matrix type. Considering the number of species, and the species Chiroxiphia caudata, we found a pattern in which models that consider the matrix composition are the most plausible. Relative importance of the variables indicates that matrix is the most important single variable among the selected species (five among eight). This suggests that small fragments are effective for increasing connectivity, mainly in landscapes with a higher percentage of permeable matrix

The distribution of biodiversity richness in the tropics

We compare the numbers of vascular plant species in the three major tropical areas. The Afrotropical Region (Africa south of the Sahara Desert plus Madagascar), roughly equal in size to the Latin American Region (Mexico southward), has only 56,451 recorded species (about 170 being added annually), as compared with 118,308 recorded species (about 750 being added annually) in Latin America. Southeast Asia, only a quarter the size of the other two tropical areas, has approximately 50,000 recorded species, with an average of 364 being added annually. Thus, Tropical Asia is likely to be proportionately richest in plant diversity, and for biodiversity in general, for its size. In the animal groups we reviewed, the patterns of species diversity were mostly similar except for mammals and butterflies. Judged from these relationships, Latin America may be home to at least a third of global biodiversity

Towards a global understanding of the drivers of marine and terrestrial biodiversity

Understanding the distribution of life’s variety has driven naturalists and scientists for centuries, yet this has been constrained both by the available data and the models needed for their analysis. Here we compiled data for over 67,000 marine and terrestrial species and used artificial neural networks to model species richness with the state and variability of climate, productivity, and multiple other environmental variables. We find terrestrial diversity is better predicted by the available environmental drivers than is marine diversity, and that marine diversity can be predicted with a smaller set of variables. Ecological mechanisms such as geographic isolation and structural complexity appear to explain model residuals and also identify regions and processes that deserve further attention at the global scale. Improving estimates of the relationships between the patterns of global biodiversity, and the environmental mechanisms that support them, should help in efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change and provide guidance for adapting to life in the Anthropocene