Abstract
Understanding the spatial pattern of ecosystem services is important for effective environmental policy and decision-making. In this study, we use a geospatial decision-support tool (Marxan) to identify conservation priorities for habitat and a suite of ecosystem services (storage carbon, soil retention and water yield) in the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest from Misiones, Argentina—an area of global conservation priority. Using these results, we then evaluate the efficiency of existing protected areas in conserving both habitat and ecosystem services. Selected areas for conserving habitat had an overlap of carbon and soil ecosystem services. Yet, selected areas for water yield did not have this overlap. Furthermore, selected areas with relatively high overlap of ecosystem services tended to be inside protected areas; however, other important areas for ecosystem services (i.e., central highlands) do not have legal protection, revealing the importance of enforcing existing environmental regulations in these areas.
Highlights
Conservation prioritization has focused on habitat for species, considering endemic or endangered species distributions, and their threats or pressures [1,2,3]
This result was expected because spatial connectivity of selected planning unit (PU) was favored by habitat due to our inclusion of biological corridors in the penalty factor, while PU connectivity of soil retention was influenced by topography, where high values were concentrated in mountainous areas
This overlap of services does not coincide with selected areas for water yield, indicating that there are trade-offs involved in providing all services at the province scale
Summary
Conservation prioritization has focused on habitat for species, considering endemic or endangered species distributions, and their threats or pressures [1,2,3]. Conservationists and land managers have become interested in other aspects of conservation aside from biodiversity and habitat, such as the goods and services that benefit people that are provided by ecological systems [4,5,6]. Other environmental policies aim to achieve a balance between conservation and land conversion necessary for the production of food and other goods. These apparently diametrically-opposed goals [12,13] have encouraged two approaches for achieving greater efficiency of land use, known as land sparing [14,15,16]
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