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Tailoring evidence into action: Using a co‐design approach for biodiversity information in the Tropical Andes

AbstractBiodiversity conservation is a complex and transdisciplinary problem that requires engagement and cooperation among scientific, societal, economic, and political institutions. However, historical approaches have often failed to bring together and address the needs of all relevant stakeholders in decision‐making processes. The Tropical Andes, a biodiversity hotspot where conservation efforts often conflict with socioeconomic issues and policies that prioritize economic development, provides an ideal model to develop and implement more effective approaches. In this study, we present a co‐design approach that mainstreams and improves the flow of biodiversity information in the Tropical Andes, while creating tailored outputs that meet the needs of economic and societal stakeholders. We employed a consultative process that brought together biodiversity information users and producers at the local, national, and regional levels through a combination of surveys and workshops. This approach identified priority needs and limitations of the flow of biodiversity information in the region, which led to the co‐design of user‐relevant biodiversity indicators. By leveraging the existing capacities of biodiversity information users and producers, we were able to co‐design multiple biodiversity indicators and prioritize two for full implementation ensuring that the data was findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable based on the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. This approach helped address limitations that were identified in the stakeholder engagement process, including gaps in data availability and the need for more accessible biodiversity information. Additionally, capacity‐building workshops were incorporated for all producers of biodiversity information involved, which aimed to not only improve the current flow of biodiversity information in the region but also facilitate its future sustainability. Our approach can serve as a valuable blueprint for mainstreaming biodiversity information and making it more inclusive in the future, especially considering the diverse worldviews, values, and knowledge systems between science, policy, and practice.

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Tailoring evidence into action: using a codesign approach for biodiversity information in the Tropical Andes

AbstractBiodiversity conservation is a complex and transdisciplinary problem that requires engagement and cooperation among scientific, societal, economic, and political institutions. However, historical approaches have often failed to bring together and address the needs of relevant stakeholders in decision-making processes. The Tropical Andes, a biodiversity hotspot where conservation efforts often conflict with socioeconomic issues and policies that prioritize economic development, provides an ideal model to develop and implement more effective approaches. In this study, we present a codesign approach that mainstreams and improves the flow of biodiversity information in the Tropical Andes, while creating tailored outputs that meet the needs of economic and societal stakeholders. We employed a consultative process that brought together biodiversity information users and producers at the local, national, and regional levels through a combination of surveys and workshops. This approach identified priority needs and limitations of the flow of biodiversity information in the region, which led to the co-design of user-relevant biodiversity indicators. By leveraging the existing capacities of biodiversity information users and producers, we were able to co-design multiple biodiversity indicators and prioritize two for full implementation ensuring that the data was findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable based on the FAIR principles. This approach helped address limitations that were identified in the stakeholder engagement process, including gaps in data availability and the need for more accessible biodiversity information. Additionally, capacity-building workshops were incorporated for all stakeholders involved, which aimed to not only improve the current flow of biodiversity information in the region but also facilitate its future sustainability. Our approach can serve as a valuable blueprint for mainstreaming biodiversity information and making it more inclusive in the future, especially considering the diverse worldviews, values, and knowledge systems between science, policy, and practice.

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Building and Validating Multidimensional Datasets in Hydrology for Data and Mapping Web Service Compliance

Multidimensional, georeferenced data are used extensively in hydrology, meteorology, and water science and engineering. These data are produced, shared, and used by diverse organizations globally. Conventions have been developed to standardize the metadata and format of these datasets to ensure compatibility with current and future software and web services. However, the most common conventions are complex and difficult to implement correctly, resulting in datasets that are unusable for many applications due to a lack of compliance with the conventions. We have developed a method and software module for programmatically assigning metadata and guiding the dataset creation, validating, and cleaning process, so that convention-compliant datasets can be consistently and repeatably created by people with a limited knowledge of file formats and data standards. These datasets can then be used in any application that supports the particular standard. Specifically, this paper examines the process of building multidimensional, georeferenced netCDF datasets that are compliant with the NetCDF Climate and Forecast Conventions. We present a new free and open-source Python package called cfbuild that helps to automate the process of building or updating datasets, making them sufficiently compliant with the Climate and Forecast Conventions and the Attribute Conventions for Data Discovery so that they can be reliably served using a THREDDS Data Server and shared via OPeNDAP.

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Territorial Implications of Economic Diversification in the Waorani Ancestral Lands

At the beginning of the 2020s, roughly 80% of the original forest cover of the Western Amazon remained in a relatively compact form. Immersed in these forests lived a growing Indigenous population, increasingly concentrated in an expanding number of multi-family permanent settlements, each using a stable, rarely overlapping territory, mostly composed by natural forests, lakes, and rivers, to produce all the material necessities they traditionally required. Most were also going through important demographic and economic transformations, with direct implications on their particular territories and on the aggregate use and condition of the region’s forests. In this chapter, we examine if and how the adoption of a commercial crop alters the traditional use of the territory of 10 communities in the Waorani Ancestral Territory of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We propose and implement a spatial model of such a territory and compare it with the cultivation patterns of a common and widespread commercial crop: cacao. Results strongly suggest that the cultivation of cacao absorbs a scarce resource needed to use the territory. Furthermore, most changes are associated with the management of older productive trees, pointing at activities such as harvesting, processing, and the transportation of products, as important draws of this resource. We hypothesize that this resource is mostly 'uptime' (the proportion of time a community member is working or available for work), resulting in a reduction of the area used for traditional production. These results illustrate the situation of the productive territories of most permanent communities in the Waorani Ancestral Territory, and possibly other Indigenous communities of the Western Amazon where similar demographic and economic transformations are taking place.

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Biases and limitations of Global Forest Change and author-generated land cover maps in detecting deforestation in the Amazon

Studying land use change in protected areas (PAs) located in tropical forests is a major conservation priority due to high conservation value (e.g., species richness and carbon storage) here, coupled with generally high deforestation rates. Land use change researchers use a variety of land cover products to track deforestation trends, including maps they produce themselves and readily available products, such as the Global Forest Change (GFC) dataset. However, all land cover maps should be critically assessed for limitations and biases to accurately communicate and interpret results. In this study, we assess deforestation in PA complexes located in agricultural frontiers in the Amazon Basin. We studied three specific sites: Amboró and Carrasco National Parks in Bolivia, Jamanxim National Forest in Brazil, and Tambopata National Reserve and Bahuaja-Sonene National Park in Peru. Within and in 20km buffer areas around each complex, we generated land cover maps using composites of Landsat imagery and supervised classification, and compared deforestation trends to data from the GFC dataset. We then performed a dissimilarity analysis to explore the discrepancies between the two remote sensing products. Both the GFC and our supervised classification showed that deforestation rates were higher in the 20km buffer than inside the PAs and that Jamanxim National Forest had the highest deforestation rate of the PAs we studied. However, GFC maps showed consistently higher rates of deforestation than our maps. Through a dissimilarity analysis, we found that many of the inconsistencies between these datasets arise from different treatment of mixed pixels or different parameters in map creation (for example, GFC does not detect reforestation after 2012). We found that our maps underestimated deforestation while GFC overestimated deforestation, and that true deforestation rates likely fall between our two estimates. We encourage users to consider limitations and biases when using or interpreting our maps, which we make publicly available, and GFC’s maps.

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Conserving Ecosystem Diversity in the Tropical Andes

Documenting temporal trends in the extent of ecosystems is essential to monitoring their status but combining this information with the degree of protection helps us assess the effectiveness of societal actions for conserving ecosystem diversity and related ecosystem services. We demonstrated indicators in the Tropical Andes using both potential (pre-industrial) and recent (~2010) distribution maps of terrestrial ecosystem types. We measured long-term ecosystem loss, representation of ecosystem types within the current protected areas, quantifying the additional representation offered by protecting Key Biodiversity Areas. Six (4.8%) ecosystem types (i.e., measured as 126 distinct vegetation macrogroups) have lost >50% in extent across four Andean countries since pre-industrial times. For ecosystem type representation within protected areas, regarding the pre-industrial extent of each type, a total of 32 types (25%) had higher representation (>30%) than the post-2020 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) draft target in existing protected areas. Just 5 of 95 types (5.2%) within the montane Tropical Andes hotspot are currently represented with >30% within the protected areas. Thirty-nine types (31%) within these countries could cross the 30% CBD 2030 target with the addition of Key Biodiversity Areas. This indicator is based on the Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV) and responds directly to the needs expressed by the users of these countries.

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Are indigenous territories effective natural climate solutions? A neotropical analysis using matching methods and geographic discontinuity designs.

Indigenous Territories (ITs) with less centralized forest governance than Protected Areas (PAs) may represent cost-effective natural climate solutions to meet the Paris agreement. However, the literature has been limited to examining the effect of ITs on deforestation, despite the influence of anthropogenic degradation. Thus, little is known about the temporal and spatial effect of allocating ITs on carbon stocks dynamics that account for losses from deforestation and degradation. Using Amazon Basin countries and Panama, this study aims to estimate the temporal and spatial effects of ITs and PAs on carbon stocks. To estimate the temporal effects, we use annual carbon density maps, matching analysis, and linear mixed models. Furthermore, we explore the spatial heterogeneity of these estimates through geographic discontinuity designs, allowing us to assess the spatial effect of ITs and PAs boundaries on carbon stocks. The temporal effects highlight that allocating ITs preserves carbon stocks and buffer losses as well as allocating PAs in Panama and Amazon Basin countries. The geographic discontinuity designs reveal that ITs’ boundaries secure more extensive carbon stocks than their surroundings, and this difference tends to increase towards the least accessible areas, suggesting that indigenous land use in neotropical forests may have a temporarily and spatially stable impact on carbon stocks. Our findings imply that ITs in neotropical forests support Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. Thus, Indigenous peoples must become recipients of countries’ results-based payments.

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Progress and Gaps in Biodiversity Data Mainstreaming and Knowledge Transfer for Conservation in South America

We present an analysis of the biodiversity knowledge–implementation continuum in one of the most biologically and culturally diverse regions on the planet, South America. This chapter focuses on interactions between data producers and users, synergies and gaps in information flow between data production and decision-making processes, drawing on a survey of stakeholders from the Andean-Amazon countries.We then evaluate the progress made, and challenges faced, by the countries of the region in relation to the production and mobilization of biodiversity knowledge to support conservation action, as informed by the National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs). To further support these points, we present two case studies that illustrate (1) how building a global network of biodiversity observations has been translated into a national monitoring effort in Bolivia, and (2) the potential of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species™ (RLTS) and the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) to contribute in a concerted manner to conservation efforts in data-deficient regions.We conclude by highlighting how little is known about the cost and effectiveness of efforts aimed at narrowing the gap between biodiversity information production and demand in this region, and how critical it is for local initiatives to be fully integrated into regional and global efforts for biodiversity mainstreaming in South America to become successful.

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Are indigenous territories effective natural climate solutions? A neotropical analysis using matching methods and geographic discontinuity designs

AbstractIndigenous Territories (ITs) with less centralized forest governance than Protected Areas (PAs) may represent cost-effective natural climate solutions to meet the Paris agreement. However, the literature has been limited to examining the effect of ITs on deforestation, despite the influence of anthropogenic degradation. Thus, little is known about the temporal and spatial effect of allocating ITs on carbon stocks dynamics that account for losses from deforestation and degradation. Using Amazon Basin countries and Panama, this study aims to estimate the temporal and spatial effects of ITs and PAs on carbon stocks. To estimate the temporal effects, we use annual carbon density maps, matching analysis, and linear mixed models. Furthermore, we explore the spatial heterogeneity of these estimates through geographic discontinuity designs, allowing us to assess the spatial effect of ITs and PAs boundaries on carbon stocks. The temporal effects highlight that allocating ITs preserves carbon stocks and buffer losses as PAs in Panama and Amazon Basin countries. The geographic discontinuity designs reveal that ITs’ boundaries secure more extensive carbon stocks than their surroundings, and this difference tends to increase towards the least accessible areas, suggesting that indigenous land use in neotropical forests may have a temporarily and spatially stable impact on carbon stocks. Our findings imply that ITs in neotropical forests support Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. Thus, Indigenous peoples must become recipients of countries’ results-based payments.

Open Access
Relevant