Systematic conservation planning

The realization of conservation goals requires strategies for managing whole landscapes including areas allocated to both production and protection. Reserves alone are not adequate for nature conservation but they are the cornerstone on which regional strategies are built. Reserves have two main roles. They should sample or represent the biodiversity of each region and they should separate this biodiversity from processes that threaten its persistence. Existing reserve systems throughout the world contain a biased sample of biodiversity, usually that of remote places and other areas that are unsuitable for commercial activities. A more systematic approach to locating and designing reserves has been evolving and this approach will need to be implemented if a large proportion of today's biodiversity is to exist in a future of increasing numbers of people and their demands on natural resources

Habitat fragmentation: consequences, management and future research priorities

[Extract] Change in land use and land cover, and the associated fragmentation of habitat, is one of the most pervasive effects of human activities on the face of the globe. Habitat destruction and fragmentation are the likely primary causes of the increase in the rate of extinction over recent decades (Henle et al. 1996). All measures of habitat destruction and fragmentation in all areas on earth today indicate a severe and accelerating problem (e.g., Whitmore 1997). Even large wilderness areas like the Amazon are becoming fragmented. In the Amazon, forest clearing increased exponentially during the 1970s and 1980s (Fearnside 1987) and continues at an alarming rate. This is significant because the tropics are highly diverse and relatively unknown. In Peninsular Malaysia, for example, there are over three thousand tree species of over 30 cm diameter, compared to fifty species indigenous to continental Europe north of the Alps and west of the Urals (Whitmore 1997)

Habitat fragmentation: consequences, management and future research priorities

[Extract] Change in land use and land cover, and the associated fragmentation of habitat, is one of the most pervasive effects of human activities on the face of the globe. Habitat destruction and fragmentation are the likely primary causes of the increase in the rate of extinction over recent decades (Henle et al. 1996). All measures of habitat destruction and fragmentation in all areas on earth today indicate a severe and accelerating problem (e.g., Whitmore 1997). Even large wilderness areas like the Amazon are becoming fragmented. In the Amazon, forest clearing increased exponentially during the 1970s and 1980s (Fearnside 1987) and continues at an alarming rate. This is significant because the tropics are highly diverse and relatively unknown. In Peninsular Malaysia, for example, there are over three thousand tree species of over 30 cm diameter, compared to fifty species indigenous to continental Europe north of the Alps and west of the Urals (Whitmore 1997)

A biodiversity conservation plan for Papua New Guinea based on biodiversity trade-offs analysis

A rapid biodiversity assessment ("BioRap") project identified candidate areas for biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and provides an ongoing evaluation framework for balancing biodiversity conservation and other land use needs. Achieving a biodiversity protection target with minimum opportunity cost was an important outcome given that biodiversity values overlap with forestry production values, and high forgone forestry opportunities would mean significant losses to land owners and the government. Allocation of 16.8% of PNG's land area to some form of biodiversity protection was required, in order to achieve the level of biodiversity representation/persistence that would have been possible using only 10% of the land area if there were no constraints on land allocation and no land use history. This result minimizes potential conflict with forestry production opportunities while also taking account of land use history, human population density and previous conservation assessments. The analysis provides more than a single set of proposed priority areas. It is a framework for progressively moving towards a country-wide conservation goal, while at the same time providing opportunities to alter the priority area set in light of new knowledge, changes in land use, and/or changes in economic and social conditions

Some future prospects for systematic biodiversity planning in Papua New Guinea - and for biodiversity planning in general

We describe three challenges for biodiversity planning, which arise from a study in Papua New Guinea, but apply equally to biodiversity planning in general. These are 1) the best use of available data for providing biodiversity surrogate information, 2) the integration of representativeness and persistence goals into the area prioritization process, and 3) implications for the implementation of a conservation plan over time. Each of these problems is linked to the effective use of complementarity. Further, we find that a probabilistic framework for calculating persistence-based complementarity values over time can contribute to resolving each challenge. Probabilities allow for the exploration of a range of possible complementarity values over different planning scenarios, and provide a way to evaluate biodiversity surrogates.\ud \ud The integration of representativeness and persistence goals, via estimated probabilities of persistence, facilitates the crediting of partial protection provided by sympathetic management. For the selection of priority areas and land use allocation, partial protection may be a "given" or implied by an allocated land use. Such an integration also allows the incorporation of vulnerability/threat information at the level of attributes or areas, incorporating persistence values that may depend on reserve design. As an example of the use of persistence probabilities, we derive an alternative proposed priority area set for PNG. This is based on 1) a goal of 0.99 probability of persistence of all biodiversity surrogate attributes used in the study, 2) an assumption of a 0.10 probability of persistence in the absence of any form of formal protection, and 3) a 0.90 probability of persistence for surrogate attributes in proposed priority areas, assuming formal protection is afforded to them.\ud \ud The calculus of persistence also leads to a proposed system of environmental levies based on biodiversity complementarity values. The assigned levy for an area may change to reflect its changing complementarity value in light of changes to protection status of other areas. We also propose a number of complementarity-based options for a carbon credits framework. These address required principles of additionality and collateral benefits from biodiversity protection. A related biodiversity credits scheme, also based on complementarity, encourages investments in those areas that make greatest ongoing contributions to regional biodiversity representation and persistence. All these new methods point to a new ·systematic conservation planning" that is not focused only on selecting sets of areas but utilizes complementarity values and changes in probabilities of persistence for a range of decision making processes. The cornerstone of biodiversity planning, complementarity, no longer reflects only relative amounts of biodiversity but also relative probabilities of persistence

Practical application of biodiversity surrogates and percentage targets for conservation in Papua New Guinea

A conservation planning study in Papua New Guinea (PNG) addresses the role of biodiversity surrogates and biodiversity targets, in the context of the trade-offs required for planning given real-world costs and constraints. In a trade-offs framework, surrogates must be judged in terms of their success in predicting general biodiversity complementarity values - the amount of additional biodiversity an area can contribute to a protected set. Wrong predictions of low complementarity (and consequent allocation of non-protective land uses) may be more worrisome than wrong predictions of high complementarity (and consequent allocation of protection, perhaps unnecessarily forgoing other land uses benefiting society). Trade-offs and targets work well when predictions of complementarity are based on surrogate information that is expressed as a continuum of variation. The PNG study used hierarchical variation for environmental domains and vegetation types, and a nominated target then dictated the level within those hierarchies that was used. Internationally-promoted targets provide a potential basis for comparative evaluation of biodiversity protection levels among countries or regions. However, conventional application of percentage targets, in focusing on proportions of local area or on proportions of habitat types, does not serve the goal of biodiversity protection or sustainability well because targets can be miss-used to restrict the amount of biodiversity protected. At the same time, recent complaints about percentage targets are equally misguided in claiming. based on species-area curves, that 10% targets imply 50% extinctions. We apply a new approach to percentage targets in PNG, in which the maximum diversity that could be protected by an unconstrained 10% of the total area of the country becomes the working biodiversity target. Reaching that same biodiversity target may then require more than 10% of the area, because of\ud constraints (e.g., existing reserves) and costs. In the baseline analysis for PNG, we found that hierarchical variation at the level of 56A vegetation types, combined with the 608 environmental domains, could be protected in an unconstrained\ud 10% of the country. This process of determining a biodiversity target also revealed some "must-have" areas for any future conservation plan. Such must-have areas were also identified for a 15%-based target. The satisfaction of the 10%-based target in practice required 16.8% of PNG (Faith et al. 2001a). This low-cost proposed protected set corresponded to greater net benefits relative to our application of two conventional targets approaches