Climate- and fire-smart landscape scenarios call for redesigning protection regimes to achieve multiple management goals

Integrated management of biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) in heterogeneous landscapes requires considering the potential trade-offs between conflicting objectives. The UNESCO's Biosphere Reserve zoning scheme is a suitable context to address these trade-offs by considering multiple management zones that aim to minimise conflicts between management objectives. Moreover, in Mediterranean ecosystems, management and planning also needs to consider drivers of landscape dynamics such as wildfires and traditional farming and forestry practices that have historically shaped landscapes and the biodiversity they host. In this study, we applied a conservation planning approach to prioritise the allocation of management zones under future landscape and climate scenarios. We tested different landscape management scenarios reflecting the outcomes of climate-smart and fire-smart policies. We projected the expected landscape dynamics and associated changes on the distribution of 207 vertebrate species, 4 ES and fire hazard under each scenario. We used Marxan with Zones to allocate three management zones, replicating the Biosphere Reserves zoning scheme (“Core area”, “Buffer zone” and “Transition area”) to address the various management objectives within the Biosphere Reserve. Our results show that to promote ES supply and biodiversity conservation, while also minimising fire hazard, the reserve will need to: i) Redefine its zoning, especially regarding Core Areas, which need a considerable expansion to help mitigate changes in biodiversity and accommodate ES supply under expected changes in climate and species distribution. ii) Revisit current management policies that will result in encroached landscapes prone to high intensity, uncontrollable wildfires with the potential to heavily damage ecosystems and compromise the supply of ES. Our results support that both climate- and fire-smart policies in the Meseta Ibérica can help develop multifunctional landscapes that help mitigate and adapt to climate change and ensure the best possible maintenance of biodiversity and ES supply under uncertain future climate conditions.This study was supported by national funds - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under the “FirESmart” project (PCIF/MOG/ 0083/2017), and the project UIDB/04033/2020. CCS is supported by the “Financiamento Programatico” UIDP/04050/2020 funded by national funds through the FCT I.P. VH was funded by the Junta de Andalucía through an Emergia contract (EMERGIA20_00135). AR is supported by ‘Juan de la Cierva’ fellowship program funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (IJC2019-041033-I). AS ˆ received support from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through Ph.D. Grant SFRH/BD/132838/2017, funded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, and by the European Social Fund - Operational Program Human Capital within the 2014–2020 EU Strategic Framework. We thank ZASNET European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation for providing us with data on the zonation of the RBTMI

Digital conservation in biosphere reserves: Earth observations, social media, and nature's cultural contributions to people

In the “digital conservation” age, big data from Earth observations and from social media have been increasingly used to tackle conservation challenges. Here, we combined information from those two digital sources in a multimodel inference framework to identify, map, and predict the potential for nature's cultural contributions to people in two contrasting UNESCO biosphere reserves: Doñana and Sierra Nevada (Spain). The content analysis of Flickr pictures revealed different cultural contributions, according to the natural and cultural values of the two reserves. Those contributions relied upon landscape variables computed from Earth observation data: the variety of colors and vegetation functioning that characterize Doñana landscapes, and the leisure facilities, accessibility features, and heterogeneous landscapes that shape Sierra Nevada. Our findings suggest that social media and Earth observations can aid in the cost-efficient monitoring of nature's contributions to people, which underlie many Sustainable Development Goals and conservation targets in protected areas worldwide