Fine-grained data and models of protected-area management costs reveal cryptic effects of budget shortfalls

Abstract

Protected area managers face the considerable challenge of trying to achieve all of their sites', often diverse, management objectives with limited budgets. Typically, managers lack sufficient resources to carry out all the management activities required. Therefore, managers must prioritise actions and decide on trade-offs between objectives. Here we present fine-grained data on management spending for 41 protected area management units in Queensland, Australia, that demonstrate the trade-offs between objectives that managers are being required to make. Our results show that, in these reserves, the managers are often prioritising actions directed towards visitors' experience, to the detriment of actions focused on biodiversity management. We modelled these data to explore the characteristics of protected areas that influence the costs of their management. We found that total management spending was correlated with a wide range of factors, especially the amount of built infrastructure within each PA. These new data show that the effects of budgetary shortfalls are having a disproportionate but cryptic negative impact on biodiversity protection. Our study has two important implications. First, unless carefully structured techniques are used to obtain data on both current and required spending for protected area management, funding shortfalls cannot be properly estimated. Second, to the extent that the same kinds of trade-offs – to the detriment of biodiversity conservation – are being made in other protected areas as in those covered by our study, figures on overall shortfalls in management spending will underestimate the shortfalls for activities directed at the persistence of biodiversity.