Abstract
AbstractProtected areas are one of the key tools for conserving biodiversity and recent studies have highlighted the positive impact they can have in avoiding habitat conversion. However, the relationship to management actions on the ground is far less studied and we currently do not know which management actions are the most crucial for success. To investigate this, we studied the effectiveness of the protected area network of Madagascar. We estimated the impact of individual protected areas in avoiding deforestation, accounting for confounding factors (elevation, slope, distance to urban centers and infrastructure, and distance to forest edge). We then investigated whether Protected Area Management Effectiveness scores, and their different facets, explained the variation observed. We found that the majority of the analyzed protected areas in Madagascar do reduce deforestation. Protected areas with higher management scores did not perform better in terms of avoiding deforestation. We discuss potential explanations for these results, and how they might influence the validity of current methods for estimating different facets of protected area effectiveness under different deforestation scenarios.
Highlights
The establishment of protected areas (PAs) is a widely used policy tool for halting biodiversity loss, and increased PA coverage is a key target of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2018)
We suggest that one contributing explanation for the lack of correlation may be that management levels of the PAs in Madagascar were already at basic to sound levels and located in areas with low rates of forest loss, and this set of PAs provides little variation with which to explore the effect of different levels of management
One PA had overall “inadequate” management scores (Figure 4). This PA should be of utmost priority, and it is encouraging to see that the PA management effectiveness (PAME) data seem to be able to flag failing PAs that show increased deforestation, that is, higher deforestation rates than what would have been expected given the environmental covariates
Summary
The establishment of protected areas (PAs) is a widely used policy tool for halting biodiversity loss, and increased PA coverage is a key target of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2018). Matching accounts for confounding factors not related to protection per se (such as remoteness and accessibility) and provides a comparative control scenario, sharing similar characteristics to the PAs, against which to compare changes inside PAs (Andam, Ferraro, Pfaff, Sanchez-Azofeifa, & Robalino, 2008; Stuart, 2010) Studies employing such techniques, have shown that PAs have avoided habitat conversion (Andam et al, 2008; Bowker, De Vos, Ament, & Cumming, 2017; Carranza, Balmford, Kapos, & Manica, 2014; Eklund et al, 2016). We build on Eklund et al (2016), but explore the effectiveness at the individual PA level, and the link between management inputs and PA impact in avoiding deforestation
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