How much space is needed for biodiversity conservation?

Abstract

The EU's 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework call for 30% coverage of land and sea protected areas and strict protection for 10% of land area to prevent and reverse biodiversity loss. Ukraine has declared its aspiration to integrate into the European Union and must back up its statements with action and do everything to achieve such ambitious conservation goals. Like many European countries, Ukraine faces great challenges on this route. The significant level of anthropogenic transformation of the territories makes it very difficult to find new areas to expand the boundaries of the nature reserve fund. The practical steps to create nature reserves are significantly limited by legal mechanisms that guarantee land users' ownership of the relevant land plots. An important task in nature conservation is to develop indicators that can clearly and easily demonstrate the importance of areas for conservation. Such tools are necessary to convince policy makers and land users of the need to protect the relevant areas. The indicators of importance for biodiversity conservation should be scale-independent, as both large areas and small areas are important for conservation. In this article, we consider the case of a project to expand the boundaries of the Dnipro-Orylskiy Nature Reserve by adding five areas directly adjacent to it. The number of species included in the various Red Data Lists was chosen as an indicator of the conservation value of the territory. The species-area relationship was used to assess the role of scale. The number of species on the Red Lists was considered instead of the classical relationship that considers the total number of species in a community. The normalised deviation from the regression relationship was considered as an indicator of the conservation value of the respective area, which is statistically independent of the area of the site. The different Red Lists are compiled according to different criteria, so the indicator of conservation value for each Red List focuses on the relevant conservation aspect. The results of the conservation value assessment can be presented graphically, which clearly demonstrates the role of the respective areas in the maintenance of biological diversity. The proposed algorithm for assessing conservation value can be applied to a wide range of environmental protection tasks. In terms of further research, it is important to assess the role of ecosystem function assessment in the design of protected areas.