Evaluating trade-offs between quantitative and qualitative protected area objectives

Abstract

Biodiversity provides many essential and irreplaceable services to humankind including material goods (e.g. food, medicines), ecological functions (e.g. flood control, climate regulation, and nutrient cycling) and nonmaterial benefits (e.g. recreation, mental health). Increasing human populations and consumption have driven many habitats and species to the brink of extinction, threatening these very benefits on which we rely. Protected areas have emerged as one of the leading strategies to combat this biodiversity loss. However, despite recent conservation advancements, the significant time, effort and money that is placed into developing protected area networks, and the increase in protected area coverage of >30,000,000 km2 over the past 50 years, biodiversity and ecosystem services continue to deteriorate. This signifies shortfalls in our conservation strategies that are preventing protected areas from achieving their biological objectives. Many of these gaps have already been identified, such as biases in protection (representation), inadequate management and resources, and conflicts between conservation and development, all of which can inhibit reaching conservation goals. While widely recognized, the actions taken to rectify these gaps are unclear, and the synergies and trade-offs they present remain largely untested and unquantified. My PhD thesis identifies deficits of current protected area strategies (particularly related to the rapid expansion mentality) in reaching conservation goals and examines suggested solutions to the underperformance of protected areas. From this work, I discovered that marine protected areas have largely avoided abatable threats to biodiversity (Chapter 2, Kuempel et al. in review), that, in most cases, resources should be disproportionately invested in no-take protected area enforcement rather than expansion for the conservation of exploited species (Chapter 3, Kuempel et al. 2018), that the equality of habitat representation has increased by chance rather than strategic planning as protected areas have expanded (Chapter 4, Kuempel et al. 2016), and that future protected area downsizing is likely to disproportionately impact those areas in most need of protection, moving us further from representation goals (Chapter 5, Kuempel et al. in prep). These results provide essential reference points, identify critical relationships between conservation targets, and demonstrate novel metrics to measure future progress in protected area expansion as signatory nations to the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity develop protected area targets post-2020.