scholarly journals Navigating the complexities of coordinated conservation along the river Nile

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. eaau7668 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Allan ◽  
N. Levin ◽  
K. R. Jones ◽  
S. Abdullah ◽  
J. Hongoh ◽  
...  

The river Nile flows across 11 African countries, supporting millions of human livelihoods, and holding globally important biodiversity and endemism yet remains underprotected. No basin-wide spatial conservation planning has been attempted to date, and the importance of coordinated conservation planning for the Nile’s biodiversity remains unknown. We address these gaps by creating a basin-wide conservation plan for the Nile’s freshwater fish. We identify priority areas for conservation action and compare cross-boundary collaboration scenarios for achieving biodiversity conservation targets, accounting for river connectivity. We found that collaborative conservation efforts are crucial for reducing conservation costs, saving 34% of costs compared to an uncoordinated, business-as-usual scenario. While most Nile basin countries benefit from coordinating conservation planning, costs and benefits are unequally distributed. We identify “hot spots” consistently selected as conservation priority areas across all collaboration scenarios, and provide a framework for improving return on conservation investment for large and complex river systems globally.

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 539
Author(s):  
Boglárka Németh ◽  
Károly Németh ◽  
Jon N. Procter

Ordination methods are used in ecological multivariate statistics in order to reduce the number of dimensions and arrange individual variables along environmental variables. Geoheritage designation is a new challenge for conservation planning. Quantification of geoheritage to date is used explicitly for site selection, however, it also carries significant potential to be one of the indicators of sustainable development that is delivered through geosystem services. In order to achieve such a dominant position, geoheritage needs to be included in the business as usual model of conservation planning. Questions about the quantification process that have typically been addressed in geoheritage studies can be answered more directly by their relationships to world development indicators. We aim to relate the major informative geoheritage practices to underlying trends of successful geoheritage implementation through statistical analysis of countries with the highest trackable geoheritage interest. Correspondence analysis (CA) was used to obtain information on how certain indicators bundle together. Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) was used to detect sets of factors to determine positive geoheritage conservation outcomes. The analysis resulted in ordination diagrams that visualize correlations among determinant variables translated to links between socio-economic background and geoheritage conservation outcomes. Indicators derived from geoheritage-related academic activity and world development metrics show a shift from significant Earth science output toward disciplines of strong international agreement such as tourism, sustainability and biodiversity. Identifying contributing factors to conservation-related decisions helps experts to tailor their proposals for required evidence-based quantification reports and reinforce the scientific significance of geoheritage.


2014 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 369-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Paula Giorgi ◽  
Corey Rovzar ◽  
Kelsey S. Davis ◽  
Trevon Fuller ◽  
Wolfgang Buermann ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Alexander Simmons ◽  
Christoph Nolte ◽  
Jennifer McGowan

AbstractOn January 27, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, committing the United States to various goals within his campaign’s major climate policy, the Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice. Included in this executive order is a commitment to “conserving at least 30 percent of [the United States’] lands and oceans by 2030.” This ambitious conservation target signals a promising direction for biodiversity in the United States. However, while the executive order outlines several goals for climate mitigation, the ‘30×30’ target remains vague in its objectives, actions, and implementation strategies for protecting biodiversity. Biodiversity urgently needs effective conservation action, but it remains unclear where and what this 30% target will be applied to. Achieving different climate and biodiversity objectives will require different strategies and, in combination with the associated costs of implementation, will lead to different priority areas for conservation actions. Here, we illustrate what the 30% target could look like across four objectives reflective of the ambitious goals outlined in the executive order. We compile several variations of terrestrial protected area networks guided by these different objectives and examine the trade-offs in costs, ecosystem representation, and climate mitigation potential between each. We find little congruence in priority areas across objectives, emphasizing just how crucial it will be for the Biden administration to develop clear objectives and establish appropriate performance metrics from the outset to maximize both conservation and climate outcomes in support of the 30×30 target. We discuss important considerations that must guide the administration’s conservation strategies in order to ensure meaningful conservation outcomes can be achieved over the next decade.


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 903-913 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Gunton ◽  
Charles J. Marsh ◽  
Sylvain Moulherat ◽  
Anne-Kathleen Malchow ◽  
Greta Bocedi ◽  
...  

Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 372 (6544) ◽  
pp. 856-860
Author(s):  
Louise M. J. O’Connor ◽  
Laura J. Pollock ◽  
Julien Renaud ◽  
Willem Verhagen ◽  
Peter H. Verburg ◽  
...  

There is an urgent need to protect key areas for biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people (NCP). However, different values of nature are rarely considered together in conservation planning. Here, we explore potential priority areas in Europe for biodiversity (all terrestrial vertebrates) and a set of cultural and regulating NCP while considering demand for these NCP. We quantify the spatial overlap between these priorities and their performance in representing different values of nature. We show that different priorities rarely coincide, except in certain irreplaceable ecosystems. Notably, priorities for biodiversity better represent NCP than the reverse. Theoretically, protecting an extra 5% of land has the potential to double conservation gains for biodiversity while also maintaining some essential NCP, leading to co-benefits for both nature and people.


Author(s):  
Rob Critchlow ◽  
Charles A. Cunningham ◽  
Humphrey Q. P. Crick ◽  
Nicholas A. Macgregor ◽  
Michael D. Morecroft ◽  
...  

AbstractProtected area (PA) networks have in the past been constructed to include all major habitats, but have often been developed through consideration of only a few indicator taxa or across restricted areas, and rarely account for global climate change. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) aims to improve the efficiency of biodiversity conservation, particularly when addressing internationally agreed protection targets. We apply SCP in Great Britain (GB) using the widest taxonomic coverage to date (4,447 species), compare spatial prioritisation results across 18 taxa and use projected future (2080) distributions to assess the potential impact of climate change on PA network effectiveness. Priority conservation areas were similar among multiple taxa, despite considerable differences in spatial species richness patterns; thus systematic prioritisations based on indicator taxa for which data are widely available are still useful for conservation planning. We found that increasing the number of protected hectads by 2% (to reach the 2020 17% Aichi target) could have a disproportionate positive effect on species protected, with an increase of up to 17% for some taxa. The PA network in GB currently under-represents priority species but, if the potential future distributions under climate change are realised, the proportion of species distributions protected by the current PA network may increase, because many PAs are in northern and higher altitude areas. Optimal locations for new PAs are particularly concentrated in southern and upland areas of GB. This application of SCP shows how a small addition to an existing PA network could have disproportionate benefits for species conservation.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Paz-Vinas ◽  
Géraldine Loot ◽  
Virgilio Hermoso ◽  
Charlotte Veyssiere ◽  
Nicolas Poulet ◽  
...  

AbstractIntraspecific diversity informs the demographic and evolutionary histories of populations, and should be a main conservation target. Although approaches exist for identifying relevant biological conservation units, attempts to identify priority conservation areas for intraspecific diversity are scarce, especially within a multi-specific framework. We used neutral molecular data on six European freshwater fish species (Squalius cephalus, Phoxinus phoxinus, Barbatula barbatula, Gobio occitaniae, Leuciscus burdigalensis and Parachondrostoma toxostoma) sampled at the riverscape scale (i.e. the Garonne-Dordogne River basin, France) to determine hot- and cold-spots of genetic diversity, and to identify priority conservation areas using a systematic conservation planning approach. We demonstrate that systematic conservation planning is efficient for identifying priority areas representing a predefined part of the total genetic diversity of a whole landscape. With the exception of private allelic richness, classical genetic diversity indices (allelic richness, genetic uniqueness) were poor predictors for identifying priority areas. Moreover, we identified weak surrogacies among conservation solutions found for each species, implying that conservation solutions are highly species-specific. Nonetheless, we showed that priority areas identified using intraspecific genetic data from multiple species provide more effective conservation solutions than areas identified for single species or on the basis of traditional taxonomic criteria.


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