Chapter 2 - Application of Population Viability Analysis to Landscape Conservation Planning

Abstract

Large-scale landscape planning to maintain biodiversity usually integrates coarse-scale assessments of land use change with systematic evaluations of its effects on the likelihood of species becoming extinct years in the future, or their population viability. There are many methods for modeling population viability. They include demographic models that assess the impact of management on the rate of population growth or risk of extinction, analyses of occupancy using presence-absence data, population trend analysis, and genetic models that assess the loss of genetic diversity. Demographic models explicitly incorporate birth and death rates, and to varying degrees the processes that affect them, and are often used to evaluate population viability. Demographic models vary in complexity from deterministic matrix models of a single population to stochastic, spatially explicit individual-based models that keep track of each individual on specific landscapes. The population viability analysis tools are used to provide information that can, in turn, be used in either systematic conservation planning or to design landscapes. The examples of such use include setting minimum population or patch sizes for single species or multispecies systematic conservation planning, and parameterizing statistical approximation models.