Abstract
Efforts to designate priority areas for conservation have had a long history, with most modern initiatives focused on either designating areas important for biodiversity or those least impacted by direct human disturbance. Ecologically intact ecosystems are becoming increasingly limited on the planet, making their identification and conservation an important priority. Intact forest landscapes (IFL) are defined as forests that are mainly free of significant anthropogenic degradation and at least 500 km2 in size. Here we define a new metric, the Last of the Wild in each Ecoregion (LWE), as a preliminary scoping of the most intact parts of each ecoregion. IFL and LWE are approaches among a broad family of techniques to mapping ecological integrity at the global scale. Although both implicitly include species integrity as a dimension of intactness, this is inferred rather than directly measured. We assessed whether IFL or LWE areas were better at capturing species where they are most abundant using species distribution data for a set of forest species for which range-wide data were available and human activity limits the range. We found that IFL and LWE methods identified areas where species we assessed are either absent or at too low an abundance to be ecologically functional. As such many IFL/LWE polygons did not have intact fauna. We also show that 54.7% of the terrestrial realm (excluding Antarctica) has at least one species recorded as extinct and that two thirds of IFL/LWE areas overlap with areas where species have gone extinct in the past 500 years. The results show that even within the most remote areas, serious faunal loss has taken place at many localities so direct species survey work is also needed to confirm faunal intactness.
Highlights
Throughout history, the reasons why areas have been established for wildlife protection have varied considerably
The map of LWE areas is visually dominated by large areas of the northern ecoregions in tundra, taiga, and boreal forests (Figure 1)
Our results show that there are few places left on the planet that are faunally intact, a result that corresponds with many assessments of global biodiversity (e.g., Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity United Nations Environment Programme, 2014; Wolf and Ripple, 2017)
Summary
Throughout history, the reasons why areas have been established for wildlife protection have varied considerably. Some of the oldest forms of wildlife protection occurred as a result of land being put aside by the nobility for hunting (Hamin, 2002). The Białowieza Primeval Forest protected the European bison for royal hunts and its habitats persisted for over 500 years (Jedrzejewska and Jedrzejewski, 1998). Prioritization of conservation sites for other reasons started with the establishment of the first national parks in the late 1800s. In Africa, many of the first protected areas in the early to mid-1900s were established to enable sport hunting with a focus on the conservation of large mammals (with big trophies), usually where it was observed that they were declining in numbers (Willock, 1964)
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