Comparing the performance of three satellite-based data products for assessing protected area effectiveness

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) play a key role in tackling the ongoing biodiversity crisis, but there is a lack of sufficient information about how effectively they can mitigate different land-use pressures, such as deforestation and wildfires. The majority of studies assessing PA effectiveness have so far focused on forest loss as a proxy, finding that PAs in general reduce tropical deforestation pressures. However, data on the spread and incidents of fires could provide an interesting alternative, since several high-quality, open-access fire data products have lately become available at high spatial and temporal resolution. In this study, we compare how three satellite-based data products (forest loss, fire incidence, burned area) affect the results and conclusions of a matching-based analysis of the effectiveness of the PAs of Madagascar, a global biodiversity hotspot. We also compare the data products´ spatial and temporal resolution, the timespan they cover, and how user-friendly the downloading and pre-processing stages are. We found that Madagascar’s PAs have the capacity to mitigate forest conversion pressures, irrespective of which data product is used as a proxy for effectiveness. However, the level of effectiveness varies between the main forest biomes, and there is significant variation in the effectiveness between individual PAs. Overall, our results indicate that satellite-based fire data can potentially be used to a much greater extent for assessing future PA performance, especially when seeing that their high temporal resolution makes them particularly relevant for practical management purposes.