Abstract
Land-use change and climate change are recognized as two main drivers of the current biodiversity decline. Protected areas help safeguard the landscape from additional anthropogenic disturbances and, when properly designed, can help species cope with climate change impacts. When designed to protect the regional biodiversity rather than to conserve focal species or landscape elements, protected areas need to cover a representative sample of the regional biodiversity and be functionally connected, facilitating individual movements among protected areas in a network to maximize their effectiveness. We developed a methodology to define effective protected areas to implement in a regional network using ecological representativeness and functional connectivity as criteria. We illustrated this methodology in the Gaspésie region of Québec, Canada. We simulated movements for the endangered Atlantic-Gaspésie caribou population (Rangifer tarandus caribou), using an individual-based model, to determine functional connectivity based on this large mammal. We created multiple protected areas network scenarios and evaluated their ecological representativeness and functional connectivity for the current and future conditions. We selected a subset of the most effective network scenarios and extracted the protected areas included in them. There was a tradeoff between ecological representativeness and functional connectivity for the created networks. Only a few protected areas among those available were repeatedly chosen in the most effective networks. Protected areas maximizing both ecological representativeness and functional connectivity represented suitable areas to implement in an effective protected areas network. These areas ensured that a representative sample of the regional biodiversity was covered by the network, as well as maximizing the movement over time between and inside the protected areas for the focal population.
Highlights
Habitat change is recognized as the main driver of the current declines of terrestrial species [1,2,3]
We developed a methodology to define effective protected areas to implement in a regional network using ecological representativeness and functional connectivity as criteria
The 500,000 candidate protected areas networks included a Balancing functional connectivity and ecological representativeness in protected areas networks mean of 25 (SD = 2.2) candidate protected areas added to the 62 existing protected areas
Summary
Habitat change is recognized as the main driver of the current declines of terrestrial species [1,2,3]. A regional protected areas network could be considered effective insofar as it can sustain the region’s biodiversity into some reasonably foreseeable future. Such effectiveness is not guaranteed [5, 6] and could be limited by many factors [7]. When ecological representativeness is high, it is reasonable to assume that the habitat requirements for many species will be satisfied within the protected areas network This assumption is usual in conservation, and representativeness is one of the core concepts in systematic conservation planning [13, 16]
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