Abstract
Systematic conservation planning has been used extensively throughout the world to identify important areas for maintaining biodiversity and functional ecosystems, and is well suited to address large-scale biodiversity conservation challenges of the twenty-first century. Systematic planning is necessary to bridge implementation, scale, and data gaps in a collaborative effort that recognizes competing land uses. Here, we developed a conservation planning process to identify and unify conservation priorities around the central and southern Appalachian Mountains as part of the Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative (App LCC). Through a participatory framework and sequential, cross-realm integration in spatial optimization modeling we highlight lands and waters that together achieve joint conservation goals from LCC partners for the least cost. This process was driven by a synthesis of 26 multi-scaled conservation targets and optimized for simultaneous representation inside the program Marxan to account for roughly 25% of the LCC geography. We identify five conservation design elements covering critical ecological processes and patterns including interconnected regions as well as the broad landscapes between them. Elements were then subjected to a cumulative threats index for possible prioritization. The evaluation of these elements supports multi-scaled decision making within the LCC planning community through a participatory, dynamic, and iterative process.
Highlights
IntroductionSystematic conservation planning is a fertile and relatively young scientific discipline capable of examining global natural resource threats including land cover conversion, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss and climate change
Systematic conservation planning has been used extensively throughout the world to identify important areas for maintaining biodiversity and functional ecosystems, and is well suited to address large-scale biodiversity conservation challenges of the twenty-first century
Our overall conservation design encompassed a selection of discrete areas that comprised nearly 25% of the landscape (Fig. 2)
Summary
Systematic conservation planning is a fertile and relatively young scientific discipline capable of examining global natural resource threats including land cover conversion, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss and climate change It is primarily concerned with spatially identifying and prioritizing lands and waters important for functioning ecosystems and biodiversity within a transparent planning framework[1,2]. To address the large-scale changes occurring on the landscape in the last several decades many conservation planners have employed coarse-filter planning approaches These approaches focus on ecosystem and evolutionary functions to maintain community-level diversity, in contrast to those approaches that emphasize individual species conservation[17,18]. They add fine scale information to plans when considered at large extents, but fall short of providing decision-relevant information in localities
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