Catch rate composition affects assessment of protected area impacts.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Sweeney JR
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7952388 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Several global strategies for protected area (PA) expansion have been proposed to achieve the Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi target 11 as a means to stem biodiversity loss, as required by the Aichi target 12. However, habitat loss outside PAs will continue to affect habitats and species, and PAs may displace human activities into areas that might be even more important for species persistence. Here we measure the expected contribution of PA expansion strategies to Aichi target 12 by estimating the extent of suitable habitat available for all terrestrial mammals, with and without additional protection (the latter giving the counterfactual outcome), under different socio-economic scenarios and consequent land-use change to 2020. We found that expanding PAs to achieve representation targets for ecoregions under a Business-as-usual socio-economic scenario will result in a worse prognosis than doing nothing for more than 50% of the world's terrestrial mammals. By contrast, targeting protection towards threatened species can increase the suitable habitat available to over 60% of terrestrial mammals. Even in the absence of additional protection, an alternative socio-economic scenario, adopting progressive changes in human consumption, leads to positive outcomes for mammals globally and to the largest improvements for wide-ranging species.
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Project description:Despite the prevalence of protected areas, evidence of their impacts on people is weak and remains hotly contested in conservation policy. A key question in this debate is whether socioeconomic impacts vary according to social subgroup. Given that social inequity can create conflict and impede poverty reduction, understanding how protected areas differentially affect people is critical to designing them to achieve social and biological goals. Understanding heterogeneous responses to protected areas can improve targeting of management activities and help elucidate the pathways through which impacts of protected areas occur. Here, we assessed whether the socioeconomic impacts of marine protected areas (MPAs)-designed to achieve goals for both conservation and poverty alleviation-differed according to age, gender or religion in associated villages in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Using data from pre-, mid- and post-implementation of the MPAs for control and project villages, we found little empirical evidence that impacts on five key socioeconomic indicators related to poverty differed according to social subgroup. We found suggestive empirical evidence that the effect of the MPAs on environmental knowledge differed by age and religion; over the medium and long terms, younger people and Muslims showed greater improvements compared with older people and Christians, respectively.
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Project description:With the increase in illegal resource harvesting in most protected areas (PAs), the need to understand the determinants and relationships between PAs and local communities to enhance wildlife conservation is increasingly becoming important. Using focus group discussions and interviews, we established the determinants of PA staff-community relationship from both PA staff and local communities' viewpoints, and assessedperceptions of their relationship with each other. The study was guided by the following main research question, 'What is the nature of the relationship between PA staff and local communities and what are the main factors influencing the relationship?' Data were collected through focus group discussions and interviews from four PAs and their adjacent communities in Zimbabwe between July 2013 and February 2014. Our results showed that a total of seven determinants were identified as influencing PA staff-community relationship, i.e., benefit-sharing, human-wildlife conflict, compensation for losses from wildlife attacks, communication between PA staff and local communities, community participation in the management of CAMPFIRE projects, lack of community participation in tourism in PAs, and community perceptions of PA staff or PA staff perceptions of the community. Of the seven, only one determinant, benefit-sharing, was recorded as the main factor that differentially influencesthe perceptions of community and PA staff on their relationship. Furthermore, both the communities and PA staff reported mixed perceptions on their relationship with each other. We conclude that both communities' and PA staff's views on determinants are largely similar in all studied PAs irrespective of PA ownership, management and/or land use. Our findings could be relevant in policy making especially in developing countries in developing PA-community relationship framework in natural resource conservation.
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Project description:Marine protected areas (MPAs) are considered viable fisheries management tools due to their potential benefits of adult spillover and recruitment subsidy to nearby fisheries. However, before-after control-impact studies that explore the biological and fishery effects of MPAs to surrounding fisheries are scarce. We present results from a fine-scale spatial gradient study conducted before and after the implementation of a 5 km2 lobster MPA in southern Norway. A significant nonlinear response in lobster abundance, estimated as catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) from experimental fishing, was detected within 2 years of protection. After 4 years, CPUE values inside the MPA had increased by a magnitude of 2.6 compared to before-protection values. CPUE showed a significant nonlinear decline from the centre of the MPA, with a depression immediately outside the border and a plateau in fished areas. Overall fishing pressure almost doubled over the course of the study. The highest increase in fishing pressure (by a magnitude of 3) was recorded within 1 km of the MPA border, providing a plausible cause for the depression in CPUE. Taken together, these results demonstrate the need to regulate fishing pressure in surrounding areas when MPAs are implemented as fishery management tools.
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Project description:Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world's land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline. The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to help measure the conservation impact of PA management interventions is high. Here, we summarize the status of PAME assessment, review the published evidence for a link between PAME assessment results and the conservation impacts of PAs, and discuss the limitations and future use of PAME data in measuring the impact of PA management interventions on conservation outcomes. We conclude that PAME data, while designed as a tool for local adaptive management, may also help to provide insights into the impact of PA management interventions from the local-to-global scale. However, the subjective and ordinal characteristics of the data present significant limitations for their application in rigorous scientific impact evaluations, a problem that should be recognized and mitigated where possible.
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Project description:Protected areas (PAs) are expected to conserve nature and provide ecosystem services in perpetuity, yet widespread protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) may compromise these objectives. Even iconic protected areas are vulnerable to PADDD, although these PADDD events are often unrecognized. We identified 23 enacted and proposed PADDD events within World Natural Heritage Sites and examined the history, context, and consequences of PADDD events in 4 iconic PAs (Yosemite National Park, Arabian Oryx Sanctuary, Yasuní National Park, and Virunga National Park). Based on insights from published research and international workshops, these 4 cases revealed the diverse pressures brought on by competing interests to develop or exploit natural landscapes and the variety of mechanisms that enables PADDD. Knowledge gaps exist in understanding of the conditions through which development pressures translate to PADDD events and their impacts, partially due to a lack of comprehensive PADDD records. Future research priorities should include comprehensive regional and country-level profiles and analysis of risks, impacts, and contextual factors related to PADDD. Policy options to better govern PADDD include improving tracking and reporting of PADDD events, establishing transparent PADDD policy processes, coordinating among legal frameworks, and mitigating negative impacts of PADDD. To support PADDD research and policy reforms, enhanced human and financial capacities are needed to train local researchers and to host publicly accessible data. As the conservation community considers the achievements of Aichi Target 11 and moves toward new biodiversity targets beyond 2020, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers need to work together to better track, assess, and govern PADDD globally.
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Project description:Incidental entanglement in fishing gear is arguably the most serious threat to many populations of small cetaceans, judging by the alarming number of captured animals. However, other aspects of this threat, such as the potential capture of mother-offspring pairs or reproductive pairs, could be equally or even more significant but have rarely been evaluated. Using a combination of demographic and genetic data we provide evidence that i) Franciscana dolphin pairs that are potentially reproductive and mother-offspring pairs form temporal bonds, and ii) are entangled simultaneously. Our results highlight potential demographic and genetic impacts of by-catch to cetacean populations: the joint entanglement of mother-offspring or reproductive pairs, compared to random individuals, might exacerbate the demographic consequences of by-catch, and the loss of groups of relatives means that significant components of genetic diversity could be lost together. Given the social nature of many odontocetes (toothed cetaceans), we suggest that these potential impacts could be rather general to the group and therefore by-catch could be more detrimental than previously considered.
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Project description:The current paradigm for receptor-ligand dissociation kinetics assumes off-rates as functions of instantaneous force without impact from its prior history. This a priori assumption is the foundation for predicting dissociation from a given initial state using kinetic equations. Here we have invalidated this assumption by demonstrating the impact of force history with single-bond kinetic experiments involving selectins and their ligands that mediate leukocyte tethering and rolling on vascular surfaces during inflammation. Dissociation of bonds between L-selectin and P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-1 (PSGL-1) loaded at a constant ramp rate to a constant hold force behaved as catch-slip bonds at low ramp rates that transformed to slip-only bonds at high ramp rates. Strikingly, bonds between L-selectin and 6-sulfo-sialyl Lewis X were impervious to ramp rate changes. This ligand-specific force history effect resembled the effect of a point mutation at the L-selectin surface (L-selectinA108H) predicted to contact the former but not the latter ligand, suggesting that the high ramp rate induced similar structural changes as the mutation. Although the A108H substitution in L-selectin eliminated the ramp rate responsiveness of its dissociation from PSGL-1, the inverse mutation H108A in P-selectin acquired the ramp rate responsiveness. Our data are well explained by the sliding-rebinding model for catch-slip bonds extended to incorporate the additional force history dependence, with Ala-108 playing a pivotal role in this structural mechanism. These results call for a paradigm shift in modeling the mechanical regulation of receptor-ligand bond dissociation, which includes conformational coupling between binding pocket and remote regions of the interacting molecules.
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Project description:The margins of protected areas are usually considered to have greater forest degradation, and given that most mammals live outside protected areas, researchers and conservation practitioners are increasingly recognizing that nonprotected areas must be incorporated into conservation strategy. However, the strategy used to manage these areas still involves increasing the size of protected areas, while not considering the habitat characteristics and requirements of the species. In this study, during a 3-year period, camera trap and habitat characteristic surveys were used to estimate composition, diversity, and habitat characteristics of mammals to determine habitat characteristics or increase the size of protected areas what should be considered first for mammals' conservation in a nonprotected area near the Huangshan Mountains in Anhui Province, China. From June 2017 to October 2019, 18 species of mammals were recorded, more than in any other protected area nearby. The linear model analysis results showed that habitat characteristics of mammals were different and showed a significant correlation with their relative abundance. Most species were related to vegetation characteristics, except primates (Macaca thibetana), and rodents (Leopoldamys edwardsi). Therefore, to establish conservation policies for nonprotected areas, habitat characteristics should be of prime concern, followed by increasing the size of protected areas to provide effective refuge areas for species conservation.
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Project description:Governments have agreed to expand the global protected area network from 13% to 17% of the world's land surface by 2020 (Aichi target 11) and to prevent the further loss of known threatened species (Aichi target 12). These targets are interdependent, as protected areas can stem biodiversity loss when strategically located and effectively managed. However, the global protected area estate is currently biased toward locations that are cheap to protect and away from important areas for biodiversity. Here we use data on the distribution of protected areas and threatened terrestrial birds, mammals, and amphibians to assess current and possible future coverage of these species under the convention. We discover that 17% of the 4,118 threatened vertebrates are not found in a single protected area and that fully 85% are not adequately covered (i.e., to a level consistent with their likely persistence). Using systematic conservation planning, we show that expanding protected areas to reach 17% coverage by protecting the cheapest land, even if ecoregionally representative, would increase the number of threatened vertebrates covered by only 6%. However, the nonlinear relationship between the cost of acquiring land and species coverage means that fivefold more threatened vertebrates could be adequately covered for only 1.5 times the cost of the cheapest solution, if cost efficiency and threatened vertebrates are both incorporated into protected area decision making. These results are robust to known errors in the vertebrate range maps. The Convention on Biological Diversity targets may stimulate major expansion of the global protected area estate. If this expansion is to secure a future for imperiled species, new protected areas must be sited more strategically than is presently the case.
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