Abstract
Evaluating the effectiveness of existing nature reserve systems for the conservation of tropical forests is an urgent task to save the remaining biodiversity. Here, we tested the effectiveness of the reserve system on Hainan Island by conducting a three-way comparison of changes in forest area in locations within the reserves, adjacent to the reserves, and far outside of the reserves. We used a general linear model to control for the effects of covariates (historical forest area, elevation, slope, and distance to nearest roads), which may also be correlated with the changes in forest area, to better explain the effectiveness of the reserve system. From 2000 to 2010, the forest area inside Hainan’s nature reserve system showed an increase while adjacent unprotected areas and the wider, unprotected landscape both experienced deforestation. However, the simple inside-outside comparisons may overestimate the protective effect of the reserve system. Most nature reserves (>60%) showed increasing fragmentation. And the risk of rapid deforestation remained high at low elevations, where remaining forests tend to be easily logged and converted to commercial plantations. Future conservation efforts should pay more attention to those sites with less challenging environmental conditions.
Highlights
One of the most common conservation strategies in the protection of tropical forests and mitigation of climate change is the establishment of protected areas (PAs) [1,2,3]
The results indicated that the forest patches inside most Nature Reserves (NRs) were becoming isolated
Previous reports have analyzed trends at the level of the NR system, using analysis to balance the effects of the covariates that might affect changes in forest area and determining whether deforestation activities had been displaced from NRs onto adjacent unprotected areas [5,6,7,12,13,14,15,16,17]
Summary
One of the most common conservation strategies in the protection of tropical forests and mitigation of climate change is the establishment of protected areas (PAs) [1,2,3]. Past studies of the effectiveness of the PAs system have focused on improving representativeness by working on system design and identifying features that were inadequately covered relative to specified targets [9]. These studies did not reveal the impact of habitat loss and could have been misleading in terms of historical context [10,11]. Assessing the representativeness of the PAs system is not enough to determine whether it provides effective protection for tropical forests
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