Abstract
Protected areas are critical for the conservation of many threatened species. Despite this, many protected areas are acutely underfunded, which reduces their effectiveness significantly. Tourism is one mechanism to promote and fund conservation in protected areas, but there are few studies analyzing its tangible conservation outcomes for threatened species. This study uses the 415 IUCN critically endangered frog species to evaluate the contribution of protected area tourism revenue to conservation. Contributions were calculated for each species as the proportion of geographic range inside protected areas multiplied by the proportion of protected area revenues derived from tourism. Geographic ranges were determined from IUCN Extent of Occurrence maps. Almost 60% (239) of critically endangered frog species occur in protected areas. Higher proportions of total range are protected in Nearctic, Australasian and Afrotopical regions. Tourism contributions to protected area budgets ranged from 5–100%. These financial contributions are highest for developing countries in the Afrotropical, Indomalayan and Neotropical regions. Data for both geographic range and budget are available for 201 critically endangered frog species with proportional contributions from tourism to species protection ranging from 0.8–99%. Tourism's financial contributions to critically endangered frog species protection are highest in the Afrotropical region. This study uses a coarse measure but at the global scale it demonstrates that tourism has significant potential to contribute to global frog conservation efforts.
Highlights
The in-situ conservation of viable populations in natural ecosystems is widely recognized as a fundamental requirement for the maintenance of biodiversity [1]
Summary of critically endangered (CR) frogs There are 415 CR frog species in total found in 52 countries globally (Table 1, Table S1)
Conservation of CR frogs in protected areas (PAs) Protected areas are important for CR frog conservation with
Summary
The in-situ conservation of viable populations in natural ecosystems is widely recognized as a fundamental requirement for the maintenance of biodiversity [1]. An additional US$4 billion would be needed per year over 10 years to establish and manage an expanded protected area system [13,14,16,17,18]. Regardless of these projections protected area systems, in highly biodiverse developing nations, remain deficient in government funding [13,16]. They are increasingly having to become financially self sustaining [19,20]. Conservation agencies at local and national levels are exploring alternative funding mechanisms
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