Integrating conservation planning and landuse planning in urban landscapes
Introduction
The global biodiversity crisis (Western, 1992) has come about due to major landuse changes resulting from human activities (Hilty et al., 2006). This is particularly prevalent in urban areas where high levels of fragmentation are common and the greater intensity of land modification in the matrix surrounding remaining habitat is generally unsuitable for many species. The expansion of urban areas is a major threat to the biodiversity values of peri-urban areas (Williams et al., 2001), and can lead to a simplification of indigenous biodiversity (Knight, 1999). Important values are at stake; for example, in Australia, it is estimated that more than 50% of threatened species have habitat in and around major cities or in population growth areas (Yencken and Wilkinson, 2000). Mitigating the impacts of the growth of cities on natural systems and processes is complicated by high land values, a diversity of stakeholders and land tenures (Bekessy and Gordon, 2007), and is hampered by a lack of practical research concerning the threat of urbanisation to biodiversity (Miller and Hobbs, 2002).
In addition to ecological imperatives, retaining biodiversity in urban and peri-urban areas provides a number of important ecosystem services (Binning et al., 2001) and benefits for human well-being (Tzoulas et al., 2007). Furthermore, the conservation of native ecological communities close to where people live and work provides opportunities for formal education and enhances community awareness of environmental issues (Miller and Hobbs, 2002).
In Australia, the responsibility for protecting biodiversity rests with all levels of government. The Federal Government and all Australian State and Territory Governments are signatories to the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia's Biological Diversity (Department of Environment, Sport and Territories, 1996). The Federal Government also has the power to restrict activities (including urban development) that may have a significant impact on threatened species and communities though the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999. Despite these commitments, conflicts between biodiversity conservation and the development of land for population and economic growth are acute (Bekessy and Gordon, 2007).
The causal chain of events that leads to development activities around cities can be grouped into three general stages, namely strategic, rezoning, and development stages. The strategic stage involves long-term strategic planning to determine where landuse change should be occurring at a regional level. An Australian example is the planning document Melbourne 2030, which was development by the Victorian State Government to address long-term planning across the greater Melbourne region (Department of Sustainability and Environment, 2002). The second category of activities comprises the rezoning of specific tracts of land. The zoning of land designates permitted and prohibited uses, and the uses for which additional formal authorisation is required. In a peri-urban setting, this would typically result in areas with rural (farming) zonings being changed to allow residential development. The development stage involves fine scale activities, such as the subdivision of land for urban development. For effective biodiversity conservation, input is required at all three stages of the development process.
Systematic conservation planning (Margules and Pressey, 2000) is a suite of methods used to determine, implement and manage a set of areas containing desired conservation targets with the minimum expenditure of resources. A range of quantitative tools have been used to address the problem of prioritising areas for protection and these tools have potential to improve the way biodiversity is incorporated into urban planning. Methods used to address this problem include simple procedures such as ranking sites by a set of criteria such as species richness and presence of threatened species (Margules et al., 1991), to more sophisticated measures such as irreplaceability (Ferrier et al., 2000). Integer programming techniques have been applied to provide exact solutions to a range of coverage problems related to area prioritisation, where the aim is to determine the smallest set of locations needed to represent all species, or to maximise the number of species represented for a given budget (ReVelle et al., 2002, Williams et al., 2004). Spatial attributes have also been incorporated into this type of approach (J.C. Williams et al., 2005). Freely available software such as MARXAN (Ball and Possingham, 2000), C-Plan (NSW NPWS, 1999) and SITES (Andelman et al., 1999) can be used to determine networks of conservation reserves that meet specified targets for reservation (e.g. 30% of the habitat for all species) while minimising other constraints such as economic cost and the reserve boundary length.
Systematic conservation planning techniques have been applied in many areas around the world (Cabeza and Moilanen, 2001, Cowling and Pressey, 2003, Lombard et al., 2003, Margules and Pressey, 2000, Pressey et al., 1993), however they have generally been conducted in non-urban regions due to the preference of scientists to study more pristine landscapes and the difficulties of undertaking conservation activities in urban areas (Miller and Hobbs, 2002, Marzluff, 2002, Crossman et al., 2007, Bekessy and Gordon, 2007). Applying systematic conservation planning in human dominated landscapes poses significant challenges, including the need to address multiple objectives, the likelihood that many priority areas will not be available for conservation and may degrade and alter in their availability over time (Haight et al., 2005, van Langevelde et al., 2002, Weber et al., 2006). Other obstacles include political pressures for development, high land prices and small land parcels (Bekessy and Gordon, 2007). Furthermore, conservation planning in urban areas is often ancillary to planning for the provision of recreation and landscape amenity and has focussed on creating open space (Ahern, 2004, Ruliffson et al., 2003).
This paper focuses on the area prioritisation aspect of systematic conservation planning, and how it can be used to integrate information on threatened species into landuse planning at multiple scales. We present the results of a case study in the Greater Melbourne area which uses the Zonation conservation planning tool (Moilanen and Kujala, 2006) to identify conservation priorities for thirty threatened fauna species. We demonstrate how the tool can be used to quantitatively compare the current arrangement of conservation areas to the areas prioritised by Zonation, and to identify areas for their extension. We also demonstrate how the tool can be used to prioritise areas to extend Melbourne's Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) and to prioritise land not yet zoned for development, but under high (or certain) risk of being developed.
Section snippets
Study area
The city of Melbourne is located in the Port Phillip and Westernport region of the state of Victoria (Fig. 1). The Greater Melbourne area has a population of over 3.5 million people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007) and is expected to grow by one million people by 2030 (Department of Sustainability and Environment, 2002). The area is highly variable in terms of climate, geology and vegetation, spanning five bioregions that contain a diversity of vegetation types and associated habitats
Species richness
Fig. 3 presents the species habitat richness of the study area and provides an overview of how the species are distributed in the landscape. Species habitat richness (henceforth referred to simply as species richness) varies from 1 to 23 with the areas of highest species richness occurring in the north-eastern and north-western parts of the study area, with scattered areas in the north and along riparian zones. The areas that comprise habitat for more that twenty species make up 0.8% of the
Discussion
Despite the high conservation value of urban areas in Australia (Yencken and Wilkinson, 2000), systematic planning to identify land that will adequately represent species of concern is rarely undertaken at the strategic planning stage or at appropriate scales (Fallding, 2004). As a result, urban sprawl continues to lead to the loss of habitat, and populations of threatened species in many urban areas are facing extinction (Bekessy and Gordon, 2007). This paper presents the use of conservation
Conclusion
Landuse change and development around the world's urban centres is likely to be particularly pervasive in the coming years. Preventing further loss of biodiversity in urbanising areas will require a focus on scientifically derived planning at strategic stages, prior to the assessment of development plans. Urban planners require tools to assist with strategic decision making, based on a scientific understanding of landscape patterns, species requirements and development pressures. This study
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Grant Dickins for help with preparation of GIS data. This research was funded by a Commonwealth Environment Research Facility (Applied Environmental Decision Analysis) and the Australian Research Council under linkage projects LP0454979 and LP0882780 with the following industry partners: the Department of Sustainability and Environment, Hume City Council, the City of Whittlesea, Mornington Peninsula Shire, the Port Phillip and Western Port Catchment Management Authority,
Ascelin Gordon works as a post doctoral research fellow at RMIT University, Australia. His research interests are in measuring and modelling biodiversity and its relationship to urban development. Currently he is working on a project that aims to develop a more strategic approach to conservation planning in urban environments using recent advancements in ecological modelling and robust optimisation. Ascelin comes from a physics background and completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in
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Ascelin Gordon works as a post doctoral research fellow at RMIT University, Australia. His research interests are in measuring and modelling biodiversity and its relationship to urban development. Currently he is working on a project that aims to develop a more strategic approach to conservation planning in urban environments using recent advancements in ecological modelling and robust optimisation. Ascelin comes from a physics background and completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2004.
David Simondson completed a Masters in environment and planning at RMIT University, Australia. He has worked as an ecological consultant and is currently employed as an environmental planner with a local government authority.
Matt White is an ecologist with the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment. His key research interests are vegetation circumscription, spatial modelling and environmental history.
Atte Moilanen is a research fellow of the Academy of Finland and he works in the Metapopulation Research Group at the University of Helsinki. He also is associated with the Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Analysis (Univ. Melbourne) and the Commonwealth research hub in Applied Environmental Decision Analysis (Univ. Queensland). Atte has a background in computer science (MSc), applied mathematics (Techn. lic.) and spatial population ecology (PhD). His present main research interest is development of methods, theory and software for the purpose of spatial conservation assessment and prioritization.
Sarah Bekessy is a senior lecturer in environmental studies at RMIT University, Australia. Sarah and is involved in an interdisciplinary range of research projects, including two Australian Research Council research projects—Reimagining the Australian Suburb: biodiversity planning in urban fringe landscapes, and Building Capacity for a Sustainable Future: embedding education for sustainability into universities. Sarah is also involved in a new Commonwealth Environmental Research Facility titled Applied Environmental Decision Analysis that seeks to develop and test tools to support transparent decision-making for environmental management.