Abstract
Terrestrial protected areas (PAs) are cornerstones of global biodiversity conservation. Their efficacy in terms of maintaining biodiversity is, however, much debated. Studies to date have been unable to provide a general answer as to PA conservation efficacy because of their typically restricted geographic and/or taxonomic focus, or qualitative approaches focusing on proxies for biodiversity, such as deforestation. Given the rarity of historical data to enable comparisons of biodiversity before/after PA establishment, many smaller scale studies over the past 30 years have directly compared biodiversity inside PAs to that of surrounding areas, which provides one measure of PA ecological performance. Here we use a meta-analysis of such studies (N = 86) to test if PAs contain higher biodiversity values than surrounding areas, and so assess their contribution to determining PA efficacy. We find that PAs generally have higher abundances of individual species, higher assemblage abundances, and higher species richness values compared with alternative land uses. Local scale studies in combination thus show that PAs retain more biodiversity than alternative land use areas. Nonetheless, much variation is present in the effect sizes, which underscores the context-specificity of PA efficacy.
Highlights
12% of the world’s terrestrial surface is classified as some form of protected area (PA) [1]
An initial assessment of global PA efficacy should be to determine if differences exist in biodiversity between PAs and unprotected land in a direction demonstrating higher biodiversity values in the former
Most of the studies included here did find higher species abundances, assemblage abundance, and species richness inside PAs compared to areas outside them
Summary
12% of the world’s terrestrial surface is classified as some form of protected area (PA) [1]. The designation and maintenance of PAs are considered key global strategies to address the growing extinction crisis [1]. Affording an area protection, a long-standing and current centrepiece of conservation strategy [3], appears to be an effective means of conserving its biodiversity features. Studies have recognized that effective PA management is key to biodiversity protection [7], and demonstrated that PA designation achieves good conservation return on investment at a relatively low cost [10]. That in many cases PA systems are inefficiently planned to maximize benefits to biodiversity often owing to their spatial location [4,6], and worrying declines in biodiversity even within PAs in particular regions have been identified [5,8]
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