Abstract
Throughout Africa, conservancies under community and private management are becoming increasingly important as a complement to the protection offered by the established core network of protected areas, which are largely under national management. However, opportunities for creating new conservation areas are restricted by increasing demand on land use by growing human populations, and it is unclear how effectively the current protected area network captures spatial priorities for conservation. Taking into account climate-induced range-shifts, we first identified spatial priorities for antelope conservation in Africa by gap analysis of the network of protected areas listed with an IUCN category in the World Database for Protected Areas. For three countries from which information were available, we then assessed to what extent the gaps identified were covered by protected areas not listed with an IUCN category, for the latter making a distinction between whether management was referred to as community-based or not. The results showed limited overlap, indicating that the success of community-based and privately managed protected areas in covering spatial priorities from a continent-wide perspective could be increased by more strategic land use planning at the national level.
Highlights
Protected areas (PAs) constitute a cornerstone in conservation
The core networks of national parks and reserves were not designed with the sole aim of covering the areas of highest conservation priority systematically; rather, conservation often had to contend with marginal lands that were of limited use for other human activities (Joppa and Pfaff, 2009)
The priority areas for antelope conservation identified by the gap analyses of the core protected areas (PAs) network in Africa are shown together with the extent of the core PA network and supplementary PAs in the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) in Figure 1; separate solutions are illustrated for the bioclimatic envelope approach (Figure 1A), and the conservative approach where species are unable to disperse (Figure 1B)
Summary
Protected areas (PAs) constitute a cornerstone in conservation. Around 15% of the Earth’s land surface is under protection (UNEP-WCMC et al, 2019), not far off the 17% Aichi target set for 2020 set by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNEP, 2010). Whether this coverage is sufficient to effectively preserve biodiversity is the subject of debate, especially following E.O. Wilson’s call for half the Earth be set aside for wildlife conservation We focus on three countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which data were available, i.e., Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia, to explore whether communal and private conservancies as a whole are strategically located within the PA network
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