Abstract
World ecosystems are suffering from anthropogenic and natural pressure. The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) has developed analogous criteria for the Red List of Threatened Species in order to perform similar risk assessments on ecosystems, creating the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) methodology. One of the most significant challenges for the construction of these lists is gathering the available information to apply the criteria. By applying IUCN RLE criteria B (the extent of restricted geographic distribution of an ecosystem), we analyzed the threat level of 64 forest ecosystems of the Ecuadorian mainland. According to the results, limited distribution is the key risk to threatened ecosystems, which are associated with anthropogenic pressures. Our study showed that 22% of forest ecosystems are classified as threatened. This evaluation of the forest ecosystem status at a national level could lead to public awareness towards ecosystem conservation and provide reasonable strategies to managers.
Highlights
Habitat fragmentation is one of the main threats to biodiversity on local, regional and global levels [1]
In 2014, many forest ecosystems located on the coast, western Andes and valley were affected by direct human activities (Fig 6)
The primary form of land use change in the forest system was the conversion to pastures (45.67% of converted area), followed by natural shrub/grassland (24.77%), agricultural land (22.31%), others (5.48%), Fig 5
Summary
Habitat fragmentation is one of the main threats to biodiversity on local, regional and global levels [1]. There is a clear need to manage fragmented ecosystems in order to maintain and conserve the diversity of species as well as ecosystem services [2, 3]. The majority of efforts to conserve biodiversity have been focused on species, communities or their habitats, but recently, there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of considering larger scales, such as entire ecosystems and landscapes, with the aim of benefiting both biodiversity and human well-being [4,5,6]. The recent tendency in conservation planning is focused on ecosystem-level assessments, which ensures the protection of a sufficient portion of all ecosystems within a country and the persistence of lower-level biodiversity, for example, genetic diversity [7,8,9].
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