Abstract
Traditionally, biodiversity conservation gap analyses have been focused on governmental protected areas (PAs). However, an increasing number of social initiatives in conservation (SICs) are promoting a new perspective for analysis. SICs include all of the efforts that society implements to conserve biodiversity, such as land protection, from private reserves to community zoning plans some of which have generated community-protected areas. This is the first attempt to analyze the status of conservation in Latin America when some of these social initiatives are included. The analyses were focused on amphibians because they are one of the most threatened groups worldwide. Mexico is not an exception, where more than 60% of its amphibians are endemic. We used a niche model approach to map the potential and real geographical distribution (extracting the transformed areas) of the endemic amphibians. Based on remnant distribution, all the species have suffered some degree of loss, but 36 species have lost more than 50% of their potential distribution. For 50 micro-endemic species we could not model their potential distribution range due to the small number of records per species, therefore the analyses were performed using these records directly. We then evaluated the efficiency of the existing set of governmental protected areas and established the contribution of social initiatives (private and community) for land protection for amphibian conservation. We found that most of the species have some proportion of their potential ecological niche distribution protected, but 20% are not protected at all within governmental PAs. 73% of endemic and 26% of micro-endemic amphibians are represented within SICs. However, 30 micro-endemic species are not represented within either governmental PAs or SICs. This study shows how the role of land conservation through social initiatives is therefore becoming a crucial element for an important number of species not protected by governmental PAs.
Highlights
The rapid growth of anthropogenic activities has expanded cattle and agriculture frontiers into natural habitats, transforming ecosystems into fragmented, semi-natural landscapes [1]
Protection within Protected Areas (PAs) and SICs Due to the nature of transformed areas associated with established societies and settlements around the country, it is not surprising that the analyses showed that all species have lost habitat (Table S1)
For large proportion (55.7%) of endemic amphibians—98 species—presented less than 10% of their potential range was within PAs, whilst 49 species had more than 10% but less than 20% of their potential range within the limits of a PA
Summary
The rapid growth of anthropogenic activities has expanded cattle and agriculture frontiers into natural habitats, transforming ecosystems into fragmented, semi-natural landscapes [1]. Current PAs remain isolated from one another, and in many cases, natural biological pathways for plant and animal dispersal become disrupted by anthropogenic barriers [4,5] This anthropogenic matrix occupies, in several places, the majority of the landscape and acts as a filter for dispersal of animals between forest patches [6,7]. In this sense, isolated PAs managed by either federal or local governments alone are not effective in maintaining biodiversity; the necessity of developing representative and interconnected conservation area networks to preserve biodiversity is becoming more important [8]. These social initiatives are based on a cooperation scheme where strong social participation is used to implement conservation actions
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
