Abstract

Efficient biodiversity conservation requires that limited resources be allocated in accordance with national responsibilities and priorities. Without appropriate computational tools, the process of determining these national responsibilities and conservation priorities is time intensive when considering many species across geographic scales. Here, we have developed a computational tool as a module for the ArcGIS geographic information system. The ArcGIS National Responsibility Assessment Tool (NRA-Tool) can be used to create hierarchical lists of national responsibilities and priorities for global species conservation. Our tool will allow conservationists to prioritize conservation efforts and to focus limited resources on relevant species and regions. We showcase our tool with data on 258 bird species and various biophysical regions, including Environmental Zones in 58 Asian countries and regions. Our tool provides a decision support system for conservation policy with attractive and easily interpretable visual outputs illustrating national responsibilities and priorities for species conservation. The graphical output allows for smooth integration into assessment reports, such as the European Article 17 report, the Living Planet Index report, or similar regional and global reports.

Highlights

  • State signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity must define their own strategy to protect biodiversity, they must set their own priorities considering available resources

  • To avoid pitfalls caused by special constellations, we recommend using the global scale as a reference area in the following cases: (i) different borderlines for a subcontinent (e.g. Europe including parts of Turkey and Kazakhstan versus an extent based strictly on national borders) [43]), (ii) inclusion or exclusion of parts of a country that are on other continents, or (iii) countries divided by a sub-continental border (e.g. Russia)

  • When we used the Polygon Area-Approach (PA-A) instead of the Polygon CountApproach (PC-A), no country gained more than four additional species and the maximum number of species for which a country lost medium responsibility was 10

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Summary

Introduction

State signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity must define their own strategy to protect biodiversity, they must set their own priorities considering available resources. There is still room to increase the global efficiency of biodiversity conservation by aligning national conservation. GIS-based policy support tool to determine national responsibilities for biodiversity conservation. The Global Environmental Stratification: A high-resolution bioclimate map of the world [dataset]. Terrestrial ecoregions of the world – A new map of life on Earth. The sources for ecoregions, technical descriptions, and digital data mentioned in this source are available from: https://www. Worldwildlife.org/pages/conservation-science-dataand-tools IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources). Available from: https://www.iucnredlist.org/ resources/spatial-data-download IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources).

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