Abstract
Complementarity and cost-efficiency are widely used principles for protected area network design. Despite the wide use and robust theoretical underpinnings, their effects on the performance and patterns of priority areas are rarely studied in detail. Here we compare two approaches for identifying the management priority areas inside the global protected area network: 1) a scoring-based approach, used in recently published analysis and 2) a spatial prioritization method, which accounts for complementarity and area-efficiency. Using the same IUCN species distribution data the complementarity method found an equal-area set of priority areas with double the mean species ranges covered compared to the scoring-based approach. The complementarity set also had 72% more species with full ranges covered, and lacked any coverage only for half of the species compared to the scoring approach. Protected areas in our complementarity-based solution were on average smaller and geographically more scattered. The large difference between the two solutions highlights the need for critical thinking about the selected prioritization method. According to our analysis, accounting for complementarity and area-efficiency can lead to considerable improvements when setting management priorities for the global protected area network.
Highlights
Complementarity and cost-efficiency are core concepts in spatial conservation prioritization and are widely adopted as fundamental design principles of protected area (PA) networks [1, 2]
Does accounting for area-efficiency and complementarity increase the performance of the selected protected area network in terms of species representation and costs? What are their effects on the spatial arrangement of the top-priority areas? In this paper we reanalyze the results of a recent large scale conservation prioritization study of the global
The point of interest is coverage of species at 5.5% of area of the GPAN, which corresponds to the total size of 145 PAs proposed by Le Saout et al [10]
Summary
Complementarity and cost-efficiency are core concepts in spatial conservation prioritization and are widely adopted as fundamental design principles of protected area (PA) networks [1, 2]. Despite the thorough theoretical description [1,2,3], the effects of accounting for complementarity and cost-efficiency on the results of spatial conservation prioritization analyses are rarely discussed [4,5,6,7,8,9]. Does accounting for area-efficiency and complementarity increase the performance of the selected protected area network in terms of species representation and costs? In this paper we reanalyze the results of a recent large scale conservation prioritization study of the global. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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