Conservation planning Flashcards
(12 cards)
What is conservation planning?
Conservation planning is the process of assessing variation in distribution of biodiversity, threats and costs in order to prioritise where conservation efforts are best spent.
What is vulnerability?
Vulnerability is a measure of the likelihood or imminence of destruction or alteration of a habitat and is used in the vulnerability-irreplaceability framework to represent the variation in distribution of threats.
What is irreplaceability?
Irreplaceability is a measure of the importance of a site for a specific conservation goal and is used in the vulnerability-irreplaceability framework to represent the variation in distribution of biodiversity.
How can vulnerability be measured / judged?
It can be measured using environmental and spatial variables such as habitat extent using satellite images, however this only works for habitats like forests and it ignores more cryptic forms of disturbance. It can also be judged using expert opinion, the number of threatened species and the current land tenure (regions with more protected areas are less vulnerable).
How can irreplaceability be measured / judged?
It is most commonly measured by considering endemism, usually plant or bird endemism, however in most cases / for most taxa the range extent data is not precise enough. A site can be deemed as irreplaceable for a given species if a significant proportion of the global population occurs regularly at that site.
Outline the vulnerability-irreplaceability framework.
In order of decreasing priority: -
Priority 1: highly irreplaceable and highly threatened,
Priority 2: highly irreplaceable,
Priority 3: highly threatened,
Priority 4: low threat status and not very unique.
What are the 5 types of costs that need to be considered when planning conservation?
Acquisition (acquiring property rights to the land), management (of the conservation program), transaction (negotiating an economic exchange), opportunity (foregone opportunities / uses of the land), and damage (to economic activities due to the conservation program) costs.
What are the two types of problem commonly used to set conservation goals?
The minimum area problem: represent all natural features a given number of times, minimum sites / area / cost.
The maximum coverage problem: maximise the representation of natural features, limited cost / area.
Which groups developed the nine global biodiversity conservation priority templates?
The nine templates were developed by academics, environmental NGOs (e.g. WWF) and UN / World Bank institutions.
Outline the nine global biodiversity conservation priority templates.
1) Biodiversity hot spots: areas containing 0.5% of the world’s plant species as endemics, with tetrapods used as back-up.
2) Global 200 ecoregions: 238 ecoregions selected to have the most biologically or ecologically distinct species / habitats / phenomena.
3) Endemic bird areas: 218 regions where two or more ranges of endemic (<50,000 km^2) bird species overlap.
4) Megadiversity countries: 17 countries that collectively have more than two thirds of the world’s biodiversity within them - aims to use politically meaningful units.
5) The last of the wild: areas for each biome that have a Human Footprint Index score (including data on roads, agriculture, etc.) of less than or equal to 10.
6) Frontier forests: areas of large, ecologically intact, and relatively undisturbed natural forests, in an aim to promote better stewardship.
7) High-biodiversity wilderness areas: areas where at least 70% of the original vegetation is intact, leading to 5 major healthy / biologically unique areas of wilderness.
8) Crisis ecoregions: 144 ecoregions in which habitat conversion exceeds habitat protection by a ratio of 1:10 or more (endangered or critically endangered), plus 161 vulnerable (between 1:2 and 1:10).
9) Centres of plant diversity: large regions of botanical importance, including Important Plant Areas, based on threatened species / habitats and level of diversity.
What is a key disadvantage with the current nine global biodiversity conservation priority templates?
Other than the Global 200, all other templates focus purely on terrestrial ecosystems. This ignores the links between aquatic and terrestrial conservation e.g. decrease in fish stocks can lead to an increase in hunting in nearby forests.
What are proactive and reactive conservation approaches, and how do the nine templates fit into these categories?
Proactive conservation prioritises areas of low vulnerability, with the aim of conserving wild and remote habitats while land is cheap and problems aren’t an issue. High-biodiversity wilderness areas, frontier forests and last of the wild are examples of this.
Reactive conservation prioritises areas of high vulnerability, with the aim of conserving the most important threatened habitats before they disappear. Biodiversity hot spots and crisis ecoregions are examples of this.
The other templates do not incorporate vulnerability as a criterion, and so are neither proactive or reactive.
