Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 190, October 2015, Pages 115-122
Biological Conservation

National emphasis on high-level protection reduces risk of biodiversity decline in tropical forest reserves

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.05.019Get rights and content

Highlights

  • National conservation ‘emphasis’ as inferred from a country’s proportion of high-protection reserves predicts the ‘success’ of the protected areas within its borders.

  • Higher country wealth and human population lead to poorer reserve health on average.

  • National context is an important determinant of protected-area performance in terms of biodiversity trends.

Abstract

Tropical protected areas have variable success in protecting their biodiversity. Many are experiencing biodiversity declines because of pressures such as logging, fire and hunting in their immediate surroundings, and inadequate protection inside the reserves. Here we assess how the national socio-economic context in which protected areas are embedded correlates with temporal trends in the condition of their biodiversity. Focussing on 60 protected areas arrayed across the world’s major tropical regions, we examine the correlation between the biodiversity ‘health’ of protected areas and indices of human population size, wealth, governance quality, the environmental ranking of their respective nation, and national emphasis on reserve protection. We hypothesize that, after controlling for variability in socio-economic context, a country’s emphasis on implementing high-protection reserves reduces the likelihood of biodiversity decline in its protected areas. We find that, after accounting for spatial non-independence and general socio-economic context, the best predictor of biodiversity trends within a tropical protected area is the country’s overall emphasis on reserve quality, as measured by the proportion of IUCN Category I–IV reserves in nations’ protected-area networks. This result suggests that national-level policies can have an important influence on the fate of biodiversity in tropical protected areas.

Introduction

According to the World Database on Protected Areas (IUCN and UNEP-WCMC, 2013), as of 2013 there were over 210,000 protected areas worldwide, of which approximately 46% are managed explicitly for biodiversity protection (IUCN Categories I–IV; explained below) (Dudley, 2008). The percentage of the Earth’s land area under some form of legal protection has risen sharply from <4% in 1985 to nearly 15.4% by 2014 (Juffe-Bignoli et al., 2014).

Taken at face value, this trend is certainly a positive sign, but biodiversity is still in decline throughout most of the world, and it risks being degraded even further over the coming decades (Pimm et al., 2014). While protected areas can safeguard vegetation and minimize land-use pressures after establishment (Bruner et al., 2001, Geldmann et al., 2013, Carranza et al., 2014a), coverage is still inadequate because many endemic and threatened species are found entirely outside the global protected-area network (Rodrigues et al., 2004, Venter et al., 2014). Further, many protected areas – especially in the tropics – are failing to protect their biodiversity fully (Western et al., 2009, Laurance et al., 2012, Carranza et al., 2014b). A recent systematic review of protected-area effectiveness based on 76 studies concluded that, on average, the existence of a reserve protects at least some forest habitats, but evidence was inconclusive that they maintain populations of species better than do equivalent areas outside reserves (Geldmann et al., 2013). Patterns of deforestation inside and outside of protected areas are also highly variable among regions (Joppa et al., 2008), although Coetzee et al. (2014) determined via a global meta-analysis that protected areas generally have higher biodiversity values relative to comparable areas outside reserves.

There is a now a large and growing literature attempting to identify the conditions that promote effective conservation of biodiversity in protected areas. Quantifying such measures and correlates of success (and failure) are essential to justify continued expansion of the network and conservation investment in general (Parrish et al., 2003). The problem is that few protected areas have robust monitoring designs in place to measure biodiversity trends (Parrish et al., 2003, Ferraro and Pattanayak, 2006, Geldmann et al., 2013), such that many studies are obliged to measure proxies for ‘success’. For example, deforestation pressures outside 36 protected areas were thought to signal future conservation failures within them (Naughton-Treves et al., 2005), an expectation that was corroborated by observations of declining biodiversity within tropical protected areas where outside pressures were relatively higher (Laurance et al., 2012). On a finer scale, the greatest differences in terms of threatening processes (land clearing, logging, hunting, fire, grazing) inside and outside tropical protected areas correlated most strongly with guard density, the deterrent level focused on illegal activity, border demarcation and the presence of direct-compensation programs for local residents (Bruner et al., 2001). Likewise, a comparison of 40 tropical protected areas to 33 community-managed forests suggested lower deforestation in the latter due to their higher relative community engagement (Porter-Bolland et al., 2012). The intensity of law enforcement and NGO support were the best predictors of great ape survival among 109 resource management areas in Africa (Tranquilli et al., 2012), and enforcement was the most effective contributor to reductions in poaching in Serengeti National Park (Hilborn et al., 2006).

A recent study based on validated interviews of 262 expert biologists across the tropics was the first to provide empirical evidence of biodiversity change in a large sample of protected areas (Laurance et al., 2012). They showed that biodiversity was being substantially eroded in about half of the reserves examined, with the remainder largely ‘succeeding’ in sustaining their biodiversity. In fact, a composite reserve ‘health’ index derived from an average trend of the ten best-studied guilds indicated that most (85%) of the protected areas examined had a health index  0, indicating a variable but generally worsening overall trend in biodiversity. Further, a simple bivariate linear model suggested that improving on-the-ground protection (management) explained the most variation in reserve health (Laurance et al., 2012).

The suggestion that general management commitment, like the presence of field researchers (Laurance, 2013) and park rangers within a particular reserve improving its biodiversity prospects (Leverington et al., 2010), is tantalizing and merits further investigation. The problem is that such fine-scale budgetary and management details are missing for most parks (Bruner et al., 2004, Coad et al., 2013), and especially for most of the tropical protected areas for which a biodiversity health index exists. At the global scale, at least, there is clear evidence that some socio-economic indicators affect the environmental performance of a country, with increasing relative national ‘wealth’ in particular leading to poorer environmental outcomes (Bradshaw et al., 2010). We therefore asked a similar question of whether the national ‘emphasis’ on protected areas accounts for some of the variation in tropical reserve health. We hypothesize that the more a country ‘invests’ in reserves designed specifically to protect local biodiversity, the lower the likelihood that its protected areas will fail to achieve that protection. We therefore compared the reserve health index of Laurance et al. (2012) to the proportion of reserves within each nation categorized by the IUCN as established primarily for the reasons of biodiversity conservation (Categories I–IV) (Joppa et al., 2008) as an index of national conservation emphasis. We also controlled for other socio-economic differences among countries including country area, human population size, wealth, wealth inequality and corruption, while simultaneously accounting for spatial and national non-independence in the dataset.

Section snippets

Reserve health

Due to the paucity of long-term biodiversity trend data in tropical protected areas, we used the published data describing the biodiversity ‘health’ of 60 pan-tropical reserves within 36 countries (Laurance et al., 2012). The health index is an integrated assessment of biodiversity trends across 10 guilds deemed sensitive to environmental changes by local experts (Laurance et al., 2012). Six of these guilds are considered ‘disturbance avoiders’ (apex predators, large non-predatory vertebrates,

Results

Many countries (22/60 = 37%) had only one protected area represented in the sample, although two countries had up to four protected areas (Brazil and Malaysia) (Fig. 1A). To visualise the relationships, the percentage of ‘high-protection’ reserves (IUCN categories Ia, b + II + IV) varied from >80% (Thailand & India) to zero (Papua New Guinea & DRC) (Fig. 1B), and the percentage of the land area protected ranged from >50% (Venezuela) to <4% (Papua New Guinea & Madagascar) (Fig. 1D) among the 36

Discussion

Our results demonstrate that a national emphasis on biodiversity conservation, as implied by the proportion of tropical forest reserves designed specifically for biodiversity protection (IUCN Categories I–IV), was the most important correlate of reserve health among the variables we examined. As a crude metric that can be applied to any country, this relative index of a country’s emphasis on protected-area quality appears to correlate with real biodiversity outcomes. Considering that a

Acknowledgments

We thank L. Joppa and the Zoological Society of London for encouraging the development of this paper. The study was funded in part by the Australian Research Council.

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