Systematic Conservation Planning

Abstract

The high rate of biodiversity loss due to human activities constitutes a sixth major extinction and is driven largely by habitat loss and fragmentation. An antidote is to carefully restitch the fabric by systematically prioritizing where new locations for conservation should be and building habitat corridors. Edward O. Wilson in his popular book Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (see Wilson 2016, cited under The Reason for Planning: Nature in Pieces), argued that we need to manage as much as half of the planet for biodiversity and ecosystem services, bold thinking that has been followed with policy initiatives such as the 30 percent by 2030 initiatives in the United States and Europe. While the relative benefits of focusing on establishment of new protected areas versus improving the habitat quality in the human-dominated matrix are debated, we have better than ever tools and theoretical constructs to map where conservation investments should be made. Also increasing is the realization that a future in which biodiversity, including patterns and processes of change, is protected is impossible without the well-being of humans. Systematic conservation planning began as a field focused mainly on finding and setting aside combinations of places to protect biodiversity, and it has evolved to be inclusive of social, cultural, and economic conditions. Systematic conservation planning has its roots in biogeography, planning, and landscape ecology, which are rooted historically in European and Asian approaches to mapping landscapes. A field that began as an effort to understand the spatial patterns in nature, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s 1807 Essay on the Geography of Plants and N. A. Solnetsev’s 1948 exploration of Russian landscape features (urotshistshe), evolved over time to piecing back together nature’s parts. “Systematic Conservation Planning” in Nature (see Margules and Pressey 2000, cited under the Dynamic Field of Systematic Conservation Planning), urged systematically assessing the biological value of every area for its ability to represent ecological pattern and process in relation to its degree of threat and, hence, level of priority. Concurrently massive, global geospatial data gathering projects made mapping biodiversity at multiple scales more plausible. Numerous pieces of software for processing the complex tasks involved became available. Systematic conservation planning was critiqued as being tone deaf to human needs, which, in the poorer parts of the planet, often coincide with those of biodiversity. Today it’s far more intersectional, weighing combined ecological, social, and cultural factors.