Importance of Roadless Areas for the European Conservation Network

Maria K Psaralexi,Nuria Selva,Antonios D Mazaris,John D Pantis,Nefta-Eleftheria P Votsi

doi:10.3389/fevo.2017.00002

Abstract

Protected Areas are a main conservation tool to halt biodiversity loss. However, their performance has been often questioned and the need to improve their effectiveness is now more apparent than ever. Here, we propose Roadless Areas as a conservation target to increase the cover and effectiveness of Protected Areas. Roadless Areas represent natural and semi-natural areas of high conservation value that have no or little traffic and provide multiple ecosystem services. Here, we develop a methodological framework to identify Roadless Areas in Europe and assess their spatial properties and conservation status. We examine how the European Union’s conservation network, Natura 2000, would expand if Roadless Areas that are already partially included in Natura 2000 terrestrial sites or are adjacent to them would be added to the existing conservation network. We find that European lands are highly fragmented. Roadless Areas are unevenly distributed, and cover more than 30% of the European Union territory, with large Roadless Areas (≥100 km2) occupying about 18% of that surface. At the national level, there is a large variation in the percentage of overlap between Natura 2000 sites and Roadless Areas, with the Natura 2000 network currently encompassing between 19% and 89% of the Roadless Areas surface, depending on the member state. Our results demonstrate that Roadless Areas adjacent to Natura 2000 sites cover > 65% of the total Natura 2000 surface. As Roadless Areas have limited human access, we suggest integrating Roadless Areas into biodiversity conservation networks as a timely solution to minimize conflicts over expanding Protected Areas in the European Union and to achieve the goals of the European Union’s 2020 Biodiversity Strategy.

Highlights

Despite local conservation success stories and the growing public and government interest, global biodiversity seems to be continuously in decline (Butchart et al, 2010; Pimm et al, 2014)
We showed that roadless area (RA) cover only 18.5% of European Union (EU) territory and highly varied in size and geographical location; most roadless patches were very small in size
Transboundary regions contained many of the large RAs identified, while such large RAs are practically absent from central Europe

Summary

Introduction

Despite local conservation success stories and the growing public and government interest, global biodiversity seems to be continuously in decline (Butchart et al, 2010; Pimm et al, 2014). Protected Areas (PAs) networks form the most important conservation tool to tackle this decreasing trend, yet their effectiveness has been questioned (Rodrigues et al, 2004). The location of PAs is biased toward lands with low economic value, such as areas at high altitudes, steep and remote or unsuitable for agriculture, where land conversion pressures are unlikely (Joppa and Pfaff, 2009). This location bias highlights the influence of conflicts on conservation design and planning (Margules and Pressey, 2000). In cases where further expansion of PAs is difficult to achieve, efforts toward enforcement of protection and effective implementation of the law should be augmented in the existing PAs (Jenkins and Joppa, 2009)

Methods

Results

Conclusion