Achieve Conservation Outcomes Research Articles

Integrating functional connectivity and fire management for better conservation outcomes.

Globally, the mean abundance of terrestrial animals has fallen by 50% since 1970, and populations face ongoing threats associated with habitat loss, fragmentation, climate change, and disturbance. Climate change can influence the quality of remaining habitat directly and indirectly by precipitating increases in the extent, frequency, and severity of natural disturbances, such as fire. Species face the combined threats of habitat clearance, changing climates, and altered disturbance regimes, each of which may interact and have cascading impacts on animal populations. Typically, conservation agencies are limited in their capacity to mitigate rates of habitat clearance, habitat fragmentation, or climate change, yet fire management is increasingly used worldwide to reduce wildfire risk and achieve conservation outcomes. A popular approach to ecological fire management involves the creation of fire mosaics to promote animal diversity. However, this strategy has 2 fundamental limitations: the effect of fire on animal movement within or among habitat patches is not considered and the implications of the current fire regime for long-term population persistence are overlooked. Spatial and temporal patterns in fire history can influence animal movement, which is essential to the survival of individual animals, maintenance of genetic diversity, and persistence of populations, species, and ecosystems. We argue that there is rich potential for fire managers to manipulate animal movement patterns; enhance functional connectivity, gene flow, and genetic diversity; and increase the capacity of populations to persist under shifting environmental conditions. Recent methodological advances, such as spatiotemporal connectivity modeling, spatially explicit individual-based simulation, and fire-regime modeling can be integrated to achieve better outcomes for biodiversity in human-modified, fire-prone landscapes. Article impact statement: Land managers may conserve populations by using fire to sustain or enhance functional connectivity.

Managing Marine Protected Areas in Remote Areas: The Case of the Subantarctic Heard and McDonald Islands

Large marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly being established to contribute to global conservation targets but present an immense challenge for managers as they seek to govern human interactions with the environment over a vast geographical expanse. These challenges are further compounded by the remote location of some MPAs, which magnify the costs of management activities. However, large size and remoteness alone may be insufficient to achieve conservation outcomes in the absence of critical management functions such as environmental monitoring and enforcement. The Australian subantarctic Heard Island and McDonald Islands (HIMI) Marine Reserve is among the world’s most remote MPAs with notoriously harsh oceanographic conditions, and yet the region’s rich mammal and fish resources have been exploited intermittently since the mid-1800s. More recently, the development of lucrative international markets for Patagonian toothfish, sold as Chilean seabass, led to the growth in both legal and illegal fishing. In 2002, to conserve the unique ecology and biodiversity in the area, Australia declared a 65,000 km2 MPA around HIMI. Worldwide, government agencies have, however, struggled to develop cost-effective institutional arrangements for conservation. This paper therefore draws upon the social-ecological systems meta-analysis database (SESMAD) to characterize the structure of conservation governance and outcomes in the HIMI Marine Reserve. The Marine Reserve has generally been successful in supporting a sustainable fishery while addressing threats to biodiversity. The remote and isolated nature of the Marine Reserve was critical to its success, but also benefited greatly from collaborations between managers and the fishing industry. Commercial fishers keep watch over the Reserve while fishing, report any observations of illegal fishing (none since 2006/07), and have at times been asked to verify remote observation of potential illegal fishing vessels. The industry also undertakes annual ecological surveys in the MPA, allowing managers to track environmental trends. The fishing industry itself highlights the importance of industry participation in conservation planning, strengthened by secure access to resources via statutory fishing rights, which provide critical incentives to invest in conservation. We therefore reflect on the potential application of this case to other remote large MPAs, highlighting potential directions for future research.

Building a stakeholder-led common vision increases the expected cost-effectiveness of biodiversity conservation.

Uniting diverse stakeholders through communication, education or building a collaborative ‘common vision’ for biodiversity management is a recommended approach for enabling effective conservation in regions with multiple uses. However, socially focused strategies such as building a collaborative vision can require sharing scarce resources (time and financial resources) with the on-ground management actions needed to achieve conservation outcomes. Here we adapt current prioritisation tools to predict the likely return on the financial investment of building a stakeholder-led vision along with a portfolio of on-ground management strategies. Our approach brings together and analyses expert knowledge to estimate the cost-effectiveness of a common vision strategy and on-ground management strategies, before any investments in these strategies are made. We test our approach in an intensively-used Australian biodiversity hotspot with 179 threatened or at-risk species. Experts predicted that an effective stakeholder vision for the region would have a relatively low cost and would significantly increase the feasibility of on-ground management strategies. As a result, our analysis indicates that a common vision is likely to be a cost-effective investment, increasing the expected persistence of threatened species in the region by 9 to 52%, depending upon the strategies implemented. Our approach can provide the maximum budget that is worth investing in building a common vision or another socially focused strategy for building support for on-ground conservation actions. The approach can assist with decisions about whether and how to allocate scarce resources amongst social and ecological actions for biodiversity conservation in other regions worldwide.

Paying the price for the meat we eat

An increasingly gloomy picture is painted by research focusing on the environmental challenges faced by our planet. Biodiversity loss is ongoing, landscapes continue to transform, and predictions on the effects of climate change worsen. Calls have been made for urgent action to avoid pushing our planet into a new system state. One of the principal threats to biodiversity is intensive agriculture, and in particular the livestock industry, which is an important driver of greenhouse gas emissions, habitat degradation and habitat loss. Ongoing intensification of agricultural practices mean that farmland no longer provides a habitat for many species. We suggest the use of a growing policy tool, biodiversity offsetting, to tackle these challenges. Biodiversity offsetting, or ecological compensation, assesses the impacts of new development projects and seeks to avoid, minimise and otherwise compensate for the ecological impacts of these development projects. By applying biodiversity offsetting to agriculture, the impacts of progressively intensifying farming practices can be compensated to achieve conservation outcomes by using tools like environmental taxes or agri-environment schemes. Low intensity, traditional, farming systems provide a number of benefits to biodiversity and society, and we suggest that the consumer and the agriculture industry compensate for the devastating ecological impacts of intensive farming so that we can once again preserve biodiversity in our landscapes and attempt to limit global temperature rise below 2°c.

Social identity shapes support for management of wildlife and pests

Public attitudes are important in shaping wildlife management decisions. However, publics are not homogeneous, and conflicting perceptions and attitudes often create barriers to achieving conservation outcomes. Here we use a social identity approach to analyze public acceptance of different options for managing four animals in Australia (kangaroos, wild horses, dingoes, and red foxes). We conducted an online survey (N = 793) of adult residents of Australia. Analyses indicate 11.4% of respondents strongly identified as animal rights activists, 19.0% as wildlife conservationists, and 19.2% as farmers. Using the Potential for Conflict Index and permutational multivariate analysis of variance, we found that on average, all identity groups supported nonlethal management for all species and reintroduction or maintenance of dingoes to suppress kangaroos and red foxes. All identity groups except farmers were generally unsupportive of lethal control, but there was less consensus among responses within groups compared with support for nonlethal methods. Results suggest that policies which prioritize nonlethal management over lethal control (where effective) will be less controversial than those that use lethal management. Likewise, incorporating predator conservation into ecosystem restoration seems well supported across constituencies typically interested in wildlife conservation.

Insights on fostering the emergence of robust conservation actions from Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE program

One strategy to address threats to biodiversity in the face of ongoing budget constraints is to create an enabling environment that facilitates individuals, communities and other groups to self-organise to achieve conservation outcomes. Emergence (new activities and initiatives), and robustness (durability of these activities and initiatives over time), two related concepts from the common pool resources literature, provide guidance on how to support and enable such self-organised action for conservation. To date emergence has received little attention in the literature. Our exploratory synthesis of the conditions for emergence from the literature highlighted four themes: for conservation to emerge, actors need to 1) recognise the need for change, 2) expect positive outcomes, 3) be able to experiment to achieve collective learning, and 4) have legitimate local scale governance authority. Insights from the literature on emergence and robustness suggest that an appropriate balance should be maintained between external guidance of conservation and enabling local actors to find solutions appropriate to their contexts. We illustrate the conditions for emergence, and its interaction with robustness, through discussing the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) in Zimbabwe and reflect on efforts at strengthening local autonomy and management around the world. We suggest that the delicate balance between external guidance of actions, and supporting local actors to develop their own solutions, should be managed adaptively over time to support the emergence of robust conservation actions.

Path-dependent institutions drive alternative stable states in conservation

Understanding why some renewable resources are overharvested while others are conserved remains an important challenge. Most explanations focus on institutional or ecological differences among resources. Here, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence that conservation and overharvest can be alternative stable states within the same exclusive-resource management system because of path-dependent processes, including slow institutional adaptation. Surprisingly, this theory predicts that the alternative states of strong conservation or overharvest are most likely for resources that were previously thought to be easily conserved under optimal management or even open access. Quantitative analyses of harvest rates from 217 intensely managed fisheries supports the predictions. Fisheries' harvest rates also showed transient dynamics characteristic of path dependence, as well as convergence to the alternative stable state after unexpected transitions. This statistical evidence for path dependence differs from previous empirical support that was based largely on case studies, experiments, and distributional analyses. Alternative stable states in conservation appear likely outcomes for many cooperatively managed renewable resources, which implies that achieving conservation outcomes hinges on harnessing existing policy tools to navigate transitions.

Metrics for evaluating representation target achievement in protected area networks

AbstractGlobal conservation targets (e.g. Aichi Target 11) have helped drive a dramatic expansion of the global protected area (PA) network. Credible metrics have an important role to play in evaluating and expanding PAs to achieve conservation outcomes and objectives. For metrics to be useful and adopted, they need to be transparent, easy to understand, and easy to implement. We present two complementary metrics, “mean protection gap” and “mean target achievement”, for evaluating representation target achievement in PA networks along with the R package “ConsTarget” that calculates and plots both metrics. We use Australia's proposed Commonwealth Marine Reserve network as a case study to demonstrate the application of these metrics. We recommend the metrics be used to evaluate the progress towards building representative PA networks in line with Aichi target 11's goals.

Assessing the new social forestry project in Indonesia: recognition, livelihood and conservation?

Indonesia is undergoing major policy changes, seeking to expand social forestry designations from less than 1% (1.1 million hectares) to over 10% (12.7 million hectares) of the Forest Estate. Expanding designations is at once a landmark reform and a call for caution, raising questions about policy intentions, and practical concerns about legal, technical, and implementation mechanisms. Social forestry literature highlights three key tenets, namely efforts that: confer rights to local communities, support livelihoods, and achieve conservation outcomes. This paper examines social forestry implementation from a cross-section of sites in South Sulawesi by reflecting on sustained action research between 2012–2016. The approach critically juxtaposes social forestry policy intent with implementation at three different sites. Findings indicate social forestry implementation suffers from historically problematic state enclosures and flawed land administration processes, entrenched politicaleconomic interests among local actors, and lack of institutional engagement beyond the permitting process. Shortcuts to addressing entrenched conflict will only heighten tensions or further marginalize the most vulnerable, without guarantees to conservation outcomes.

The role of stakeholder perceptions and institutions for marine reserve efficacy in the Midriff Islands Region, Gulf of California, Mexico

Governance of marine resources underscores the role of social, economic, and political objectives in achieving conservation outcomes. Marine protected areas, specifically no-take areas (NTAs) where all extractive uses are prohibited, are now widely-used to promote sustainable fisheries and protect marine biodiversity. However, no-take areas have had mixed success, and the governance structures that determine success are not well understood. The institutional, social, economic, and political context of the no-take areas and the response of resource users to their establishment are rarely considered in establishing marine reserves. In developing countries with high levels of poverty and low enforcement capacity, harvest practices rarely adhere to formal laws and regulations. As a consequence, many no-take areas have become “paper parks” that fail to provide ecological and social benefits. In this paper, we use the Coupled-Infrastructure System (CIS) framework to explore the problem of “paper parks” by assessing stakeholder perceptions, preferences, and levels of knowledge on NTAs within a regional system of three no-take areas in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Using structured interviews, we found differences in perceptions about the use of NTAs for conservation of biodiversity and management of fisheries, misconceptions about the location of current NTAs, and problems of non-compliance behavior. We identify a weak relationship between the perception of NTAs by the resource users and the way in which current NTA tools operate in Mexico. Consequently, anticipated success based on the mere presence of the NTA and its regulations is hindered by how the resource users interact with the resource itself, but more importantly by what leads up to this hindrance. A focus on this weakness in the CIS system is critical to achieving NTA objectives.

How to Achieve Conservation Outcomes at Scale: An Evaluation of Scaling Principles

The importance of scaling initiatives that promote environmental protection and conservation is almost universally recognized. But how is scaling best achieved? We empirically evaluated the relationship of a list of factors that have been postulated to facilitate successful scaling to the degree of scaling success achieved in 56 case studies from a variety of sectors. We identified 23 factors that are significantly associated with successful scaling, defined as self-replication: an innovation that is congruent with local sociocultural patterns, takes advantage of existing scaled infrastructure, and facilitates a paradigm shift; adequate resources and constituencies for scaling, secured from the start, drawn from both within and outside the system; pilot sites that reflect conditions at future sites rather than ideal conditions; clear and deliberate scaling expectations and strategy; capitalization on economies of scale; a project team that has a unifying vision, includes both individuals who helped design the innovation and members of the target audience, and empowers users with the requisite skills; target audiences that take ownership of the project; the provision of long-term support systems; ongoing learning about the factors influencing scaling; direct management of relevant supply and demand streams; targeted marketing and dissemination efforts; and the evaluation of scaling success indicators. We also explored correlations between these principles, and identified a group of principles that together explain nearly 40% of the variance in success: the provision of long-term support systems (or one of its surrogates: turning users into partners, a user organization with wide reach, and the empowerment of the target audience with requisite skills); resources mobilized from within and outside the system; user organizations that have the capacity to implement the innovation; innovations that are platform solutions and that provide rapid feedback; and pilot sites that have realistic conditions relative to future sites. Our results suggest that for scaling to be successful: 1) scaling must be considered at all stages of a project; 2) the context must be managed and barriers to scaling must be identified and removed and 3) deliberate attention must be paid to scaling methods, marketing and dissemination efforts, and long-term monitoring of scaling progress.

Can ecological thinning deliver conservation outcomes in high-density river red gum forests? Establishing an adaptive management experiment

Newly protected areas often have land-use legacies that affect their capacity to deliver conservation outcomes into the future. The management actions required to achieve conservation outcomes may be uncertain. This uncertainty may be resolved through experimental adaptive management that draws on knowledge of the ecology and history of the ecosystem. In New South Wales, Australia, river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) floodplain forests were gazetted as National Park in 2010, including Murray Valley National Park. Land-use legacies had resulted in one-third of river red gum forests and woodlands occurring as high-stem-density (>400 stems ha−1) stands at the time of gazettal. High-stem-density stands are characterised by dominance of narrow straight trees, a paucity of large and hollow-bearing trees, modified understorey vegetation and reduced coarse woody debris. A simple state-and-transition process model captured knowledge of the processes that led to the high-stem-density river red gum forest state being widespread. We describe the establishment of a manipulative experiment to evaluate whether ecological thinning can achieve conservation outcomes in high-stem-density stands of river red gum floodplain forest. The experiment was designed to reduce intrastand competition for water and other resources, and encourage development of spreading tree crowns. Future results will inform management decisions in high-stem-density stands of river red gum floodplain forests. The adaptive management approach employed provides a template for using knowledge of the ecosystem to resolve uncertainty about management, particularly in newly protected areas.

Reinvigorating the vision: conservation boards’ role in 21st-century nature conservation

Public and stakeholder involvement in nature conservation through conservation boards has been a distinctive feature of New Zealand’s statutory framework for conservation, put in place in 1987. Since their inception, effective boards established for the purpose of ensuring that conservation stakeholders’ voices inform conservation planning have been regarded, at least in official discourse, as a key mechanism for achieving conservation outcomes. They replaced the existing national parks boards and, like their parent body, the New Zealand Conservation Authority, were intended to focus on the entire conservation estate.

Marine protection targets: an updated assessment of global progress

AbstractDespite the considerable expansion in the number and extent of marine protected areas during the past century, coverage remains limited amid concerns that many marine protected areas are failing to meet their objectives. New estimates of global marine protected area, based on the database maintained by Sea Around Us, revealed a degree of progress towards protecting at least 10% of the global ocean by 2020. It is estimated that > 6,000 marine protected areas, covering c. 3.27% (12 million km2) of the oceans, had been designated by the end of 2013. However, protection is generally weak, with c. one-sixth (1.9 million km2) of the combined area designated as no-take areas (i.e. fishing and other extractive activities are prohibited). Additional large tracts of ocean will need to be protected to reach the 10% target, and we investigate hypothetical scenarios for such expansion. Such scenarios offer a one-dimensional measure of progress as they do not address aspects of other global targets, such as Aichi Target 11, which will help to ensure that marine protected areas meet their objectives and achieve conservation outcomes.

Social equity and the probability of success of biodiversity conservation

Conservation actions generally benefit some groups more than others, and this inequity is thought to affect the probability of achieving conservation objectives. This has led to the common assumption that triple bottom line solutions – those that are effective, efficient, and equitable – are best and most likely to achieve each individual objective. Although this may be true, it has been little tested, and importantly lacks a conceptual foundation for understanding, predicting and evaluating how equity affects conservation outcomes. We describe types of equity relevant to conservation and explore how they may affect the probability of successfully achieving conservation outcomes. Depending on the equity type and context, the relationship between equity and conservation success varies. We find that the best conservation outcome is often achieved without perfect equity; highlighting the risk of ignoring the relationship between equity and success. We offer a conceptual foundation for better addressing this important issue in future research and application.

Exploring Local Perspectives for Conservation Planning: A Case Study from a Remote Forest Community in Indonesian Papua

Reconciling conservation and livelihoods is a concern wherever forests are important in local people’s lives. We plead for engaging these people in survey activities to clarify what is important to them, as a first step in conservation planning. This will help to address their priorities and gain their guidance and support for interventions. This paper presents the results of such a survey with the community of Kwerba in Mamberamo, a remote and little known part of Indonesian Papua. Views and priorities were explored through interviews, scoring exercises, community mapping and a field survey. Whereas small gardens provided most staple food, culture and livelihoods were linked to the forest. People scored primary forest highest for nearly all use categories. Primary forest was particularly highly valued as a source of construction materials, ornaments and rituals, and as a hunting place. We developed a list of the overall most important plants and animals. Many natural resources were used, but few were commercially exploited. The community had rules to control access to certain areas and resources. Taboos to restrict access to sacred places were also maintained. Our evaluation identified opportunities to achieve conservation outcomes jointly with the Kwerba people. In follow-up activities, the community presented local government with a land-use plan for their territory. The government recognized the value of our approach and requested training to implement it more widely in the region.

Why Conservation Needs Religion

Conservationists have been criticized for failing to protect nature in the face of mounting threats including overexploitation, species loss, habitat destruction, and climate change. Resource managers and scientists have yet to fully engage a major segment of the global population in their outreach efforts to protect the environment: religious communities. The world's religions have been recognized as a surprising driver of support for conservation of biological diversity, and numerous examples demonstrate religious and conservation groups working together to achieve conservation outcomes. However, many conservation organizations do not effectively engage religious groups. When conservation organizations do engage religious groups, efforts to do so are often ad hoc and such partnerships may wane over time. A more systematic approach is needed that directly engages religious communities, develops effective partnerships, supports and sustains dialogue aimed at finding common ground despite potentially divergent worldviews, and establishes supporting mechanisms to maintain the partnerships that are developed. Effective partnerships between religious and conservation groups represent significant untapped potential which can directly support conservation outcomes; such partnerships are likely to become increasingly important with dwindling support for conservation.

Conservation Trust Funds, Protected Area Management Effectiveness, and Conservation Outcomes: Lessons from the Global Conservation Fund

The Global Conservation Fund (GCF) is a global programme intended to address the problems associated with protected areas that lack sufficient resources to function effectively. In operation since 2001, GCF has built a global portfolio of over 65 protected area investments linked to a comprehensive integrated data set on protected area management effectiveness and conservation outcomes. With data collected over the last six years (2008-2013), this paper attempts to answer two questions: 1) What is the relationship between conservation investments and the enabling conditions needed to achieve conservation outcomes? 2) Does stable funding correlate with a stable or improving deforestation rate? Results from analysis of this data suggest that regular, sustained investment in protected area management resulted in a statistically significant decline in deforestation rates in and around these protected areas. Additionally, we find that higher scores on management effectiveness were associated with lower deforestation rates. This suggests that monitoring the enabling conditions for effective protected area management provides a reasonable proxy for conservation outcomes as measured by changes in deforestation rates. These results make a compelling argument that Conservation Trust Funds are valuable tools to help protected areas deliver on their objectives and contribute to global conservation targets.

Bark in the park: a review of domestic dogs in parks.

The presence of domestic dogs Canis familiaris in public open spaces is increasingly controversial. In our review of the literature, we located 133 publications of various types (papers, reports etc.) that examine some aspect of dogs in parks and open spaces (50 % focussed solely on dogs). There has been an exponential growth in the cumulative number of articles (R (2) = 0.96; 82 % published since 1997); almost all pertain to temperate latitudes (97 %) and most to the northern hemisphere (62 %). Most articles focus on impacts on wildlife (51 %), zoonotic diseases (17 %), and people's perceptions regarding dogs (12 %). Articles mostly describe problems associated with dogs, while reports of low compliance with dog regulations are common. We outline six major findings regarding dogs in parks: (1) there is a paucity of information on dogs in parks, particularly in relation to their interactions with wildlife and regarding their management; (2) published studies are mainly restricted to a handful of locations in developed countries; (3) sectors of societies hold different views over the desirability of dogs in parks; (4) the benefits and risks of dogs to humans and park values are poorly documented and known; (5) dogs represent a notable disease risk in some but not all countries; and (6) coastal parks are over-represented in the literature in terms of potential negative impacts. Park managers globally require better information to achieve conservation outcomes from dog management in parks.

Avian responses to the diversity and configuration of fire age classes and vegetation types across a rainfall gradient

In many regions, planned burns are implemented to reduce fuel loads and mitigate wildfire risk; increasingly, they are also used to achieve conservation outcomes. However, there is uncertainty regarding how best to apply fire to landscapes in order to enhance biodiversity. The assumption that variable fire regimes are conducive to biodiversity conservation is appealing given its basis in landscape ecological theory, which predicts that spatially complex landscapes sustain greater biodiversity. This supposition is often used as a basis for fire management but has rarely been tested in the context of fire. We sought to test predicted positive relationships between bird diversity and both landscape diversity and configuration in the fire-prone Otway Ranges, southeast Australia, where vegetation transitions from treeless heath to tall open eucalypt forest across a rainfall gradient. We used a whole-of-landscape sampling approach, and mapped fire age classes and vegetation types separately within thirty-six 300ha landscape sampling units. Bird surveys were undertaken at sub-sampling locations during two successive years, and presence-absence data were used to generate landscape-level estimates of species richness and turnover. Generalized linear mixed models, model selection and model averaging were used to investigate how birds responded to landscape diversity and configuration across the rainfall gradient. Species richness was positively associated with age class diversity, age class configuration and vegetation type diversity. Species turnover was positively associated with age class diversity in areas of lower rainfall but exhibited a negative response in areas of higher rainfall. Neither response variable was associated with vegetation type configuration. This study is one of few landscape scale analyses to provide empirical support for the widely held assumption that spatially variable fire regimes can increase the diversity of faunal assemblages. Further, our results demonstrated consistency in responses of species richness to fire-mediated landscape complexity across a rainfall gradient. Managers can potentially increase bird species richness by increasing both the diversity of fire age classes, and the complexity of age class configuration, within relatively small (300ha) areas.