Tag: biodiversity
Introduction: background to a global exchange
Global biodiversity conservation priorities
The location of and threats to biodiversity are distributed unevenly, so prioritization is essential to minimize biodiversity loss. To address this need, biodiversity conservation organizations have proposed nine templates of global priorities over the past decade. Here, we review the concepts, methods, results, impacts, and challenges of these prioritizations of conservation practice within the theoretical irreplaceability/vulnerability framework of systematic conservation planning. Most of the templates prioritize highly irreplaceable regions; some are reactive (prioritizing high vulnerability), and others are proactive (prioritizing low vulnerability). We hope this synthesis improves understanding of these prioritization approaches and that it results in more efficient allocation of geographically flexible conservation funding.
Fire, ecosystems & people: threats and strategies for global biodiversity conservation
Snaring and wildlife wastage in Africa: drivers, scale, impacts, and paths to sustainability
Snaring is considered to be the most common form of hunting in Africa. Although snaring can provide hunters with valuable food and income, it can also devastate wildlife populations when practiced unsustainably and has significant animal welfare implications. Snaring can also be wasteful, both when animals escape with fatal injuries and when catch is discarded. In the present article, we argue that snaring is a regional-scale threat to wildlife and to the sustainable use of biodiversity in Africa. We show that snaring in Africa is geographically widespread and locally intense, that tens of millions of snares are likely set across the continent annually, and that, at a minimum, tens of millions of kilograms of wild meat are probably wasted in Africa every year because of snaring. We discuss opportunities to address these impacts through changes to governance and enforcement and by reducing urban demand for wild meat.
What constitutes a useful measure of protected area effectiveness? A case study of management inputs and protected area impacts in Madagascar
Protected areas are one of the key tools for conserving biodiversity and recent studies have highlighted the positive impact they can have in avoiding habitat conversion. However, the relationship to management actions on the ground is far less studied and we currently do not know which management actions are the most crucial for success. To investigate this, we studied the effectiveness of the protected area network of Madagascar. We estimated the impact of individual protected areas in avoiding deforestation, accounting for confounding factors (elevation, slope, distance to urban centers and infrastructure, and distance to forest edge). We then investigated whether Protected Area Management Effectiveness scores, and their different facets, explained the variation observed. We found that the majority of the analyzed protected areas in Madagascar do reduce deforestation. Protected areas with higher management scores did not perform better in terms of avoiding deforestation. We discuss potential explanations for these results, and how they might influence the validity of current methods for estimating different facets of protected area effectiveness under different deforestation scenarios.
Forest fragmentation and biodiversity: the case for intermediate-sized conservation areas
Understanding the effects of forest fragmentation on biodiversity is essential for successful and efficient forest conservation. Four factors may cause loss of biodiversity in forest fragments: the effect of non-random sampling of the original forest, reduced forest size, isolation and edge effects. A review of 58 papers on effects of forest fragmentation reveals that general conclusions from fragmentation research are biased due to a focus on birds, on size-effects rather than isolation, and on species presence rather than population sizes. Perhaps the most important finding is that current knowledge on fragmentation effects is based mainly on studies in small fragments (10 000 – 100 000 ha) and should focus on the biological and human-induced processes which determine species presistence.
Managing for biodiversity in humid tropical forests
One of the major issues surrounding the debate on sustainability of management of tropical forests is the impact of different forest management strategies on biodiversity. Recent research has suggested a number of options for minimising the risks to biodiversity of forestry operations. The maintenance of extensive conventional national parks and equivalent reserves still constitutes the best option from the purely biological standpoint. However, social, economic and demographic realities coupled with increased knowledge of the ecology and distribution of tropical forest species, suggests that appropriate forestry practice can contribute significantly to biodiversity conservation. The optimal strategy should be based upon a system of conventional protected areas, complemented by a reduction of the impact of harvesting and the retention of unlogged refugia in logged-over-forests.
Developing swidden agriculture and the threat of biodiversity loss
Indonesia has the world’s third largest area of tropical forest. These forests are treasured for their high biodiversity, a result of the country’s unique geographic positioning, but also as an economically important natural resource. Although the early decades of accelerated timber exploitation in Indonesia demonstrated little concern for the sustainability of forest resources, recently a shift to genuine conservationist forest policies can be observed. These new policies, however, mainly relate to the forestry sector and much less to the ongoing conflicts between the state and forest-dependent people. It is still a commonly held belief that swidden agriculturists are responsible for about half of Indonesia’s annual deforestation. In order to solve this problem the government has defined a number of measures that attempt to convert swidden agriculturists into sedentary cultivators. In this paper these measures are discussed, and they are juxtaposed against new insights about the nature of the dynamics of swidden agriculture and the role that forest management plays in this agricultural method. The official schemes propose only some sort of plantation development, which significantly reduces biodiversity in the agricultural landscape. With an example of swidden agriculture from West Kalimantan, including an important forest management component, this paper demonstrates that developing existing agriculture-forest management regimes holds the potential to bring economic development to the region, while biodiversity is conserved.
Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme – We love our Rupununi wild (4)
The Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme in Guyana is encouraging coordinated community-driven initiatives that support food security and traditional livelihoods. These will contribute to maintaining healthy fish and terrestrial wildlife populations. It is being implemented by the Guyana Wildlife Conservation and Management Commission in coordination with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). The SWM Programme is the first international initiative to tackle the wild meat challenge by addressing both wildlife conservation and food security. Between 2018 and 2024, the SWM Programme implements field projects across 3 continents. The aim is to improve how wildlife hunting is regulated; increase the supply of sustainably produced meat products and farmed fish; strengthen the management capacities of indigenous and rural communities; reduce demand for wild meat, particularly in towns and cities. The SWM Programme is an Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States initiative, which is being funded by the European Union with co-funding from the French Global Environment Facility. The SWM Programme is being implemented by a dynamic consortium of partners which includes FAO, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).