Abstract
The global loss of biodiversity threatens unique biota and the functioning and services of ecosystems essential for human wellbeing. To safeguard biodiversity and ecosystem services, designating protected areas is crucial; yet the extent to which the existing placement of protection is aligned to meet these conservation priorities is questionable, especially in the oceans. Here we investigate and compare global patterns of multiple biodiversity components (taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional), ecosystem services and human impacts, with the coverage of marine protected areas across a nested spatial scale. We demonstrate a pronounced spatial mismatch between the existing degree of protection and all the conservation priorities above, highlighting that neither the world’s most diverse, nor the most productive ecosystems are currently the most protected ecosystems. Furthermore, we show that global patterns of biodiversity, ecosystem services and human impacts are poorly correlated, hence complicating the identification of generally applicable spatial prioritization schemes. However, a hypothetical “consensus approach” would have been able to address all these conservation priorities far more effectively than the existing degree of protection, which at best is only marginally better than a random expectation. Therefore, a holistic perspective is needed when designating an appropriate degree of protection of marine conservation priorities worldwide.
Highlights
The global loss of biodiversity is threatening unique biota, as well as the functioning and services of ecosystems essential for human wellbeing[1,2,3]
In order to assess the current degree of protection of key marine conservation priorities we investigate and compare global patterns of biodiversity, including fish species richness (SR), phylogenetic- (PD)[13] and functional diversity (FD)[14] with multiple indices of marine ecosystem services[15] and the coverage of marine protected area (MPA) worldwide
We account for global patterns of cumulative human impacts[16] since assessing the status of protection without considering the magnitude of anthropogenic stressors acting on biodiversity and ecosystem services provide little guidance to management and conservation when prioritizing areas in urgent need of protection[17]
Summary
Our results demonstrate a pronounced spatial mismatch between the existing degree of protection and key conservation priorities worldwide This is clearly illustrated by the marked spatial differences between current levels of marine protection and levels produced using a hypothetical “consensus approach” that assigns levels of protection based on all the key conservation concerns considered in this study, with equal weighting given to each conservation concern (Fig. 1a). Functional diversity and an aggregated metric of biodiversity (based on PC1 of a principle component analysis on SR, FD and PD accounting for 92% of the total variability), less than 5% of randomly generated prioritizations outperformed the current prioritization, while for PD and ecosystem services (represented by mean fish landings from 1950–2013) current prioritization of protection did not differ significantly from random expectations. Our consensus approach did produce a global conservation scheme that was substantially better than the existing coverage and in all cases significantly outperformed the randomized prioritization
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