The role of property rights in shaping the effectiveness of protected areas and resisting forest loss in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Miteva DA
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6505956 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:One-sixth of the global terrestrial surface now falls within protected areas (PAs), making it essential to understand how far they mitigate the increasing pressures on nature which characterize the Anthropocene. In by far the largest analysis of this question to date and not restricted to forested PAs, we compiled data from 12,315 PAs across 152 countries to investigate their ability to reduce human pressure and how this varies with socioeconomic and management circumstances. While many PAs show positive outcomes, strikingly we find that compared with matched unprotected areas, PAs have on average not reduced a compound index of pressure change over the past 15 y. Moreover, in tropical regions average pressure change from cropland conversion has increased inside PAs even more than in matched unprotected areas. However, our results also confirm previous studies restricted to forest PAs, where pressures are increasing, but less than in counterfactual areas. Our results also show that countries with high national-level development scores have experienced lower rates of pressure increase over the past 15 y within their PAs compared with a matched outside area. Our results caution against the rapid establishment of new PAs without simultaneously addressing the conditions needed to enable their success.
| S-EPMC6859326 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Protected areas (PAs) are the cornerstones of global biodiversity conservation efforts, but to fulfil this role they must be effective at conserving the ecosystems and species that occur within their boundaries. Adequate monitoring datasets that allow comparing biodiversity between protected and unprotected sites are lacking in tropical regions. Here we use the largest citizen science biodiversity dataset - eBird - to quantify the extent to which protected areas in eight tropical forest biodiversity hotspots are effective at retaining bird diversity. We find generally positive effects of protection on the diversity of bird species that are forest-dependent, endemic to the hotspots, or threatened or Near Threatened, but not on overall bird species richness. Furthermore, we show that in most of the hotspots examined this benefit is driven by protected areas preventing both forest loss and degradation. Our results provide evidence that, on average, protected areas contribute measurably to conserving bird species in some of the world's most diverse and threatened terrestrial ecosystems.
| S-EPMC7490714 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Climate change leads to species' range shifts, which may end up reducing the effectiveness of protected areas. These deleterious changes in biodiversity may become amplified if they include functionally important species, such as herbivores or pollinators. We evaluated how effective protected areas in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest are in maintaining the diversity of tiger moths (Arctiinae) under climate change. Specifically, we assessed whether protected areas will gain or lose species under climate change and mapped their locations in the Atlantic Forest, in order to assess potential spatial patterns of protected areas that will gain or lose species richness. Comparisons were completed using modeled species occurrence data based on the current and projected climate in 2080. We also built a null model for random allocation of protected areas to identify where reductions in species richness will be more severe than expected. We employed several modern techniques for modeling species' distributions and summarized results using ensembles of models. Our models indicate areas of high species richness in the central and southern regions of the Atlantic Forest both for now and the future. However, we estimate that in 2080 these regions should become climatically unsuitable, decreasing the species' distribution area. Around 4% of species were predicted to become extinct, some of them being endemic to the biome. Estimates of species turnover from current to future climate tended to be high, but these findings are dependent on modeling methods. Our most important results show that only a few protected areas in the southern region of the biome would gain species. Protected areas in semideciduous forests in the western region of the biome would lose more species than expected by the null model employed. Hence, current protected areas are worse off, than just randomly selected areas, at protecting species in the future.
| S-EPMC4168255 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Protected areas in Guatemala provide habitat for diverse tropical ecosystems, contain ancient archeological sites, sequester carbon, and support economic activity through eco-tourism. However, many of the forests in these protected areas have been converted to other uses or degraded by human activity, and therefore are considered "paper parks". In this study, we analyzed time series of satellite data to monitor deforestation, degradation, and natural disturbance throughout Guatemala from 2000 to 2017. A recently developed methodology, Continuous Degradation Detection (CODED), was used to detect forest disturbances of varying size and magnitude. Through sample-based statistical inference, we estimated that 854 137 ha (± 83 133 ha) were deforested and 1 012 947 ha (±139 512 ha) of forest was disturbed but not converted during our study period. Forest disturbance in protected areas ranged from under 1% of a park's area to over 95%. Our estimate of the extent of deforestation is similar to previous studies, however, degradation and natural disturbance affect a larger area. These results suggest that the total amount of forest disturbance can be significantly underestimated if degradation and natural disturbance are not taken into account. As a consequence, we found that the protected areas of Guatemala are more affected by disturbance than previously realized.
| S-EPMC7317481 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In spite of the high importance of forests, global forest loss has remained alarmingly high during the last decades. Forest loss at a global scale has been unveiled with increasingly finer spatial resolution, but the forest extent and loss in protected areas (PAs) and in large intact forest landscapes (IFLs) have not so far been systematically assessed. Moreover, the impact of protection on preserving the IFLs is not well understood. In this study we conducted a consistent assessment of the global forest loss in PAs and IFLs over the period 2000-2012. We used recently published global remote sensing based spatial forest cover change data, being a uniform and consistent dataset over space and time, together with global datasets on PAs' and IFLs' locations. Our analyses revealed that on a global scale 3% of the protected forest, 2.5% of the intact forest, and 1.5% of the protected intact forest were lost during the study period. These forest loss rates are relatively high compared to global total forest loss of 5% for the same time period. The variation in forest losses and in protection effect was large among geographical regions and countries. In some regions the loss in protected forests exceeded 5% (e.g. in Australia and Oceania, and North America) and the relative forest loss was higher inside protected areas than outside those areas (e.g. in Mongolia and parts of Africa, Central Asia, and Europe). At the same time, protection was found to prevent forest loss in several countries (e.g. in South America and Southeast Asia). Globally, high area-weighted forest loss rates of protected and intact forests were associated with high gross domestic product and in the case of protected forests also with high proportions of agricultural land. Our findings reinforce the need for improved understanding of the reasons for the high forest losses in PAs and IFLs and strategies to prevent further losses.
| S-EPMC4605629 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Protected areas aim to conserve nature, ecosystem services, and cultural values; however, they have variable success in doing so under high development pressure. Southeast Asian protected areas faced the highest level of human pressure at the turn of the twenty-first century. To estimate their effectiveness in conserving forest cover and forest carbon stocks for 2000-2018, we used statistical matching methods to control for the non-random location of protected areas, to compare protection against a matched counterfactual. We found Southeast Asian protected areas had three times less forest cover loss than similar landscapes without protection. Protected areas that had completed management reporting using the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) conserved significantly more forest cover and forest carbon stocks than those that had not. Management scores were positively associated with the level of carbon emissions avoided, but not the level of forest cover loss avoided. Our study is the first to find that METT scores could predict the level of carbon emissions avoided in protected areas. Given that only 11% of protected areas in Southeast Asia had completed METT surveys, our results illustrate the need to scale-up protected area management effectiveness reporting programs to improve their effectiveness for conserving forests, and for storing and sequestering carbon.
| S-EPMC8660836 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Given the central importance of protected area systems in local, regional and global conservation strategies, it is vital that there is a good understanding of their effectiveness in maintaining ecological functioning. Here, we provide, to our knowledge, the first such global analysis, focusing on plant production, a "supporting" ecosystem function necessary for multiple other ecosystem services. We use data on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) as a measure of variation in plant production in the core, boundary and surroundings of more than 1000 large protected areas over a 25 year period. Forested protected areas were higher (or similar), and those non-forested were lower (or similar), in NDVI than their surrounding areas, and these differences have been sustained. The differences from surrounding areas have increased for evergreen broadleaf forests and barren grounds, decreased for grasslands, and remained similar for deciduous forests, woodlands, and shrublands, reflecting different pressures on those surroundings. These results are consistent with protected areas being effective both in the representation and maintenance of plant production. However, widespread overall increases in NDVI during the study period suggest that plant production within the core of non-forested protected areas has become higher than it was in the surroundings of those areas in 1982, highlighting that whilst the distinctiveness of protected areas from their surroundings has persisted the nature of that difference has changed.
| S-EPMC3084248 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Protected areas (PAs) cover a quarter of the tropical forest estate. Yet there is debate over the effectiveness of PAs in reducing deforestation, especially when local people have rights to use the forest. A key analytic problem is the likely placement of PAs on marginal lands with low pressure for deforestation, biasing comparisons between protected and unprotected areas. Using matching techniques to control for this bias, this paper analyzes the global tropical forest biome using forest fires as a high resolution proxy for deforestation; disaggregates impacts by remoteness, a proxy for deforestation pressure; and compares strictly protected vs. multiple use PAs vs indigenous areas. Fire activity was overlaid on a 1 km map of tropical forest extent in 2000; land use change was inferred for any point experiencing one or more fires. Sampled points in pre-2000 PAs were matched with randomly selected never-protected points in the same country. Matching criteria included distance to road network, distance to major cities, elevation and slope, and rainfall. In Latin America and Asia, strict PAs substantially reduced fire incidence, but multi-use PAs were even more effective. In Latin America, where there is data on indigenous areas, these areas reduce forest fire incidence by 16 percentage points, over two and a half times as much as naïve (unmatched) comparison with unprotected areas would suggest. In Africa, more recently established strict PAs appear to be effective, but multi-use tropical forest protected areas yield few sample points, and their impacts are not robustly estimated. These results suggest that forest protection can contribute both to biodiversity conservation and CO2 mitigation goals, with particular relevance to the REDD agenda. Encouragingly, indigenous areas and multi-use protected areas can help to accomplish these goals, suggesting some compatibility between global environmental goals and support for local livelihoods.
| S-EPMC3156699 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Mexico is one of the three areas of the world with the greatest terrestrial and cultural biological diversity. The diversity of Mexican medicinal flora has been studied for a long time and several bioactive compounds have been isolated. The investigation of marine resources, and particularly the potential of Mexican marine resources, has not been intensively investigated, even though the Yucatan Peninsula occupies 17.4% of the total of the Mexican coast, with great biological diversity in its coasts and the ocean. There are very few studies on the chemistry of natural products from marine organisms that were collected along the coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula and most of them are limited to the evaluation of the biological activity of their organic extracts. The investigations carried out on marine species from the Yucatan Peninsula resulted in the identification of a wide structural variety of natural products that include polyketides, terpenoids, nitrogen compounds, and biopolymers with cytotoxic, antibacterial, antifouling, and neurotoxic activities. This review describes the literature of bioprospecting and the exploration of the natural product diversity of marine organisms from the coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula up to mid-2019.
| S-EPMC7024426 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Protected areas (PAs) have been established to conserve tropical forests, but their effectiveness at reducing deforestation is uncertain. To explore this issue, we combined high resolution data of global forest loss over the period 2000-2012 with data on PAs. For each PA we quantified forest loss within the PA, in buffer zones 1, 5, 10 and 15 km outside the PA boundary as well as a 1 km buffer within the PA boundary. We analysed 3376 tropical and subtropical moist forest PAs in 56 countries over 4 continents. We found that 73% of PAs experienced substantial deforestation pressure, with >0.1% a(-1) forest loss in the outer 1 km buffer. Forest loss within PAs was greatest in Asia (0.25% a(-1)) compared to Africa (0.1% a(-1)), the Neotropics (0.1% a(-1)) and Australasia (Australia and Papua New Guinea; 0.03% a(-1)). We defined performance (P) of a PA as the ratio of forest loss in the inner 1 km buffer compared to the loss that would have occurred in the absence of the PA, calculated as the loss in the outer 1 km buffer corrected for any difference in deforestation pressure between the two buffers. To remove the potential bias due to terrain, we analysed a subset of PAs (n = 1804) where slope and elevation in inner and outer 1 km buffers were similar (within 1° and 100 m, respectively). We found 41% of PAs in this subset reduced forest loss in the inner buffer by at least 25% compared to the expected inner buffer forest loss (P<0.75). Median performance (P) of subset reserves was 0.87, meaning a reduction in forest loss within the PA of 13%. We found PAs were most effective in Australasia (P = 0.16), moderately successful in the Neotropics (P = 0.72) and Africa (p = 0.83), but ineffective in Asia (P = 1). We found many countries have PAs that give little or no protection to forest loss, particularly in parts of Asia, west Africa and central America. Across the tropics, the median effectiveness of PAs at the national level improved with gross domestic product per capita. Whilst tropical and subtropical moist forest PAs do reduce forest loss, widely varying performance suggests substantial opportunities for improved protection, particularly in Asia.
| S-EPMC4669159 | biostudies-literature