Conservation Network Research Articles

Reflections on the protection of the cultural heritage from community tourism

This article analyzes the concept of community tourism as a strategy for the protection of the natural and cultural heritage of a rural urban locality through the systematization of the experience of the Cultural Organization Xiuhtecuhtli as the managing agency of the Community Museum of San Juan Xiutetelco Pue created under the principle of protection and protection of the cultural heritage of the town This experience is located as a local social movement for defense which will create social networks for heritage conservation through tourism this characteristic will make it possible to create value chains in terms of the formation of a tourism product

Stochastic Pinch Analysis To Optimize Resource Allocation Networks

Pinch analysis is a physical insight-based optimization technique, applicable to conservation problems for a wide range of resources (such as energy, water, hydrogen, cooling water, etc.). Principally, it has been applied to optimize the external resource, to satisfy unmet demands in source-sink allocation problems, with deterministic flows and deterministic quality parameters (such as contamination concentration in water and hydrogen conservation problems). However, in many applications, quality and flow parameters of different sources may not be deterministic due to changes in environmental as well as operational conditions (e.g., changes in product mix and/or feed characteristics). In this paper, the applicability of pinch analysis has been extended to resource conservation networks with uncertain qualities and flows for the operation of individual sources and demands with the desired reliability. The uncertainties in source quality and source flows are incorporated through different probability distri...

Discursive Struggle and Agency—Updating the Finnish Peatland Conservation Network

This paper explores the process of updating the peatland conservation network in Finland—the Supplemental Mire Conservation Programme, which was drafted from 2012 to 2015. This study employs discursive agency approach (DAA), to reveal how agents actively seek to gain legitimate speaker positions and influence policy outcomes as they rely on existing discourses. It also studies the role of discourse in the context of Finnish peatland conservation policy and evaluates the role of agents in the discursive process and how they influenced the outcome. The empirical data consists of expert interviews, newspaper articles and policy documents. The results indicate that the discourses of ‘maintenance of biodiversity’, ‘regulatory program’, ‘voluntary conservation’ and ‘participatory approach’ influence the peatland conservation policy. Additionally, discursive agency is achieved through hegemonic discourse and a consensus seeking argumentation strategy that rely on keywords, such voluntary and sustainability.

Chiropteran diversity in the peripheral areas of the Maduru-Oya National Park in Sri Lanka: insights for conservation and management.

In Sri Lanka, there are 31 species of bats distributed from lowlands to mountains. To document bat diversity and their habitat associations, 58 roosting sites in Maduru-Oya National Park periphery were surveyed. Fifteen bat species were recorded occupying 16 different roosting sites in this area. Among all the species recorded, Rhinolophusrouxii was the most abundant species per roosting site whereas Kerivoulapicta was the least abundant. A road-kill specimen similar to genus Phoniscus was found during the survey, a genus so far only documented in Southeast Asia and Australasia. Although our study area provided habitats for a diverse chiropteran community, the colony size per roost was remarkably low. Although our study area is supposedly a part of the park’s buffer zone, many anthropogenic activities are threatening the bat community: felling large trees, slash-and-burn agriculture, excessive use of agrochemicals, vengeful killing, and subsidized predation. We strongly recommend adoption of wildlife-friendly sustainable land management practices in the buffer zone such as forest gardening, agroforestry (alley cropping, mixed-cropping), and integrated farming. Bat conservation in this region should take a landscape-scale conservation approach which includes Maduru-Oya National Park and other surrounding protected areas into a regional conservation network. Extents of undisturbed wilderness are dramatically declining in Sri Lanka; thus, future conservation efforts must be retrofitted into anthropocentric multiuse landscapes and novel ecosystems like areas surrounding Maduru-Oya National Park.

Multi-scale habitat selection modeling identifies threats and conservation opportunities for the Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi)

Clouded leopards are among Asia's most widely distributed felids, but also among its least known and most vulnerable. Clouded leopards occur in some of the most rapidly disappearing forests in the world, yet a comprehensive assessment of their status and habitat use is lacking, which in turn limits identification of their priority conservation needs and capacity to act as umbrella species for conserving associated forest biodiversity. To address this need for the Sunda species (Neofelis diardi), we applied multi-scale modeling to identify both key environmental variables influencing habitat use and optimal scales of relationship with these variables. We detected clouded leopards at 18.3% of 1544 camera stations and 17 of 22 sampling locations on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Multi-scale GLMM revealed that recent forest loss and large-scale plantations strongly and negatively influence clouded leopard detection. Our findings also suggest that higher elevations and ridges are important components of N. diardi habitat use. We illustrate how scale optimization of habitat use can provide critical information for characterizing the requirements of protected areas, and identify core habitat patches and connectivity gaps in need of future protection. Our findings indicate greater challenges facing clouded leopards on Sumatra, including higher poaching pressure, greater fragmentation, and roughly half the habitat area available to N. diardi on Borneo. This research contributes vital insights to assist in prioritizing habitat conservation networks for the protection of this vulnerable felid and the forest biodiversity for which it is an ambassador species.

Systematic retrofit procedure for resource conservation network based on pinch analysis technique

Over the past two decades, various process integration tools have been developed for the synthesis of material resource conservation network (RCN), ranging from pinch analysis and mathematical programming techniques. Note, however, that most of these techniques were developed for grassroots design problems. In other words, the process plants are still at the design stage where the RCN does not exist yet. The grassroots design techniques are not directly applicable for existing process plants that are in operation. For the latter, some degrees of resource conservation may have been in place, though the RCNs of these process plants may not be designed systematically. Hence, this calls for the development of a systematic retrofit procedure in order to reduce both fresh resource and waste discharge flowrates for the process plants. In this work, a three-step procedure based on pinch analysis is proposed for the retrofit of existing RCNs, focusing on direct reuse/recycle scheme for single contaminant problems. A new analysis tool known as the load–flowrate diagram is proposed for the analysis of impurity load received by the material sinks. This tool helps to identify suitable sinks where unutilised sources may be recovered to. Besides, a revised nearest neighbour algorithm is proposed for the revamping of sink-source matches in the RCN. Several literature examples involving water and hydrogen networks are solved to elucidate the newly proposed procedure.

Assessment of ecological vulnerability to climate variability on coastal fishing communities: A study of Ungwana Bay and Lower Tana Estuary, Kenya

Fisheries resources are important in supporting the livelihood of many coastal communities especially in the developing tropical countries. Fisheries resources however, continue to face unprecedented pressure from the impacts of climate change, and this presents both ecological and socio-economic challenges to the dependent communities. This paper assessed the ecological vulnerability to climate variability of artisanal fishing communities in Ungwana Bay and the Lower Tana Delta in Kenya, using selected fin fish species. A combination of approaches were adopted and used to identify and determine exposure, sensitivity, and adaptation indicators. These included a critical review of existing literature, socio-economic survey, and computation of temperature and rainfall variation using long term data from 1983 to 2015. The method of Equal Weights (EW) was applied to all indicators after normalization. The data was normalized in a scale of 0–1, where 0 indicated low vulnerability level and 1 high vulnerability. By using composite index, the selected Ngomeni and Ozi fishing communities within the larger Ungwana Bay and Lower Tana Delta indicated high levels of vulnerability of 0.9 and 0.8 respectively. Due to high vulnerability level and poor adaptation capacity by the local fishing communities in the selected study sites, we recommend government and non-governmental agencies to reinforce community based organizations (CBOs) activities on ecological conservation and social network creation to promote short and long term adaptation measures.

A Source-Sink Model for Assigning Construction Firms to Projects During Urban Rebuilding

Urban rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of destructive events such as natural hazards or war invariably require allocation of scarce resources to multiple projects that run concurrently. In such scenarios, the construction firms available in a geographic locality may have insufficient capability to cope with the scale of all the rebuilding projects. In such cases, construction firms from outside of the immediate region, but with the required capabilities, may be needed to supplement local capacity. Use of such external capacity incurs additional financial and environmental penalties (e.g., carbon footprint) due to the need to transport heavy equipment, supplies and labor over greater distances. As such, it is necessary to maximize the use of locally available firms, and hence to minimize the need for external ones. The problem is conceptually similar to the optimization of Resource Conservation Networks (RCNs), and lends itself to being solved via Process Integration (PI) approaches. In this work, a source-sink model is developed to optimize the assignment of construction firms to multiple concurrent projects taking place during a concerted urban rebuilding campaign. The model is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) whose objective function is to minimize total carbon footprint during urban rebuilding. This carbon footprint is proportional to the project cost and the distance of the construction firm’s headquarters to the city where urban rebuilding is needed. A semi-hypothetical case study on urban rebuilding in the southern Philippines is used to illustrate the application of the model.

Partial migration in savanna elephant populations distributed across southern Africa

Migration is an important, but threatened ecological process. Conserving migration requires the maintenance of functional connectivity across sufficiently large areas. Therefore, we need to know if, where and why species migrate. Elephants are highly mobile and can travel long distances but we do not know if they migrate. Here, we analysed the movement trajectories of 139 savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) within eight clusters of protected areas across southern Africa to determine if elephants migrate, and if so, where, how and why they migrate. Only 25 of these elephants migrated. Elephants are a facultative partially migratory species, where only some individuals in a population migrate opportunistically, and not every year. Elephants migrated between distinct seasonal ranges corresponding to southern Africa’s dry and wet seasons. The timing of wet season migrations was associated with the onset of rainfall and the subsequent greening up of forage. Conversely, the duration, distance, and the timing of dry season migrations varied idiosyncratically. The drivers of elephant migration are likely a complex interaction between individual traits, density, and the distribution and availability of resources. Despite most migrations crossing administrative boundaries, conservation networks provided functional space for elephants to migrate.

Enhancing conservation network design with graph-theory and a measure of protected area effectiveness: Refining wildlife corridors in Belize, Central America

Maintaining connectivity among remaining natural areas has become increasingly important to ameliorate the negative effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on wildlife populations. Early corridor networks were based on structural connectivity (i.e. habitat structure) and designed to connect protected areas. In recent decades, many methods have been developed to increase the ecological realism of such corridor design to avoid misguided management. However, the multitude and complexity of methods can be a hurdle for conservation planners. Here, we combine a limited set of multiple methods to present a connectivity analysis framework that produces repeatable, intuitive, and ecologically relevant connectivity estimates. We use a modified habitat suitability analysis, accounting for protected area effectiveness, as a starting point for least-cost corridor estimates, and evaluate the network using graph theory. We apply the framework to an existing corridor network in Belize, Central America, by estimating potential functional connectivity for white-lipped peccaries Tayassu pecari between systematically identified core patches. We found that forest productivity and protected area effectiveness were important predictors of habitat suitability for white-lipped peccaries. The graph-theoretic network analyses identified particularly important core areas for overall landscape connectivity and indicated potentially weak links in the existing network, while the least-cost corridor outlines indicated general areas where the implementation of connectivity-enhancing measures could strengthen such weak links. With this study, we provide a framework to improve the scientific rigour, ecological meaningfulness, and conservation relevance of applied corridor network design.

Toward a National Conservation Network Act: Transforming Landscape Conservation on the Public Lands into Law

The United States has made a remarkable commitment to nature conservation on the federal public lands. The country’s existing array of national parks, wilderness areas, national monuments, wildlife refuges, and other protective designations encompasses roughly 150 million acres, or nearly 40 percent of the “lower 48” federal estate. A robust land trust movement has protected another 56 million acres of privately owned lands. Advances in scientific knowledge reveal that these protected enclaves, standing alone, are insufficient to protect native ecosystems and at-risk wildlife from climate change impacts and unrelenting development pressures. Abetted by existing law, conservation policy is now focusing on the larger landscape to preserve biological diversity and to promote ecological resilience as principal management goals. This growing emphasis on landscape-scale conservation is evident in various protected area complexes that have arisen organically across the federal estate in places as diverse as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, California’s Mojave Desert, and Colorado’s San Luis Valley. To fully capitalize on these ad hoc developments, this article makes the case for a new National Conservation Network Act to legitimize and expand upon these protected areas. It first reviews the origins and evolution of the nation’s protected land systems and related nature conservation strategies, and then identifies the scientific and legal developments underlying landscape-scale conservation strategies. Next, it highlights several emergent protected area complexes evident on the public lands, explaining their diverse origins and important conservation contributions. It concludes by proposing new legislation that would place a statutory umbrella over these protected complexes, mandate effective interagency coordination within them, enlist private lands as voluntary “affiliates” in these conservation efforts, and establish new wildlife corridor and restoration area designations. The proposed law would validate the current movement toward landscape conservation, and thus amplify the federal commitment to nature conservation to meet the challenges looming ahead.

Dispatch Guided Allocation Optimization for Effective Emergency Response

Plant-pollinator interaction networks are bipartite networks representing the mutualistic interactions between a set of plant species and a set of pollinator species. Data on these networks are collected by field biologists, who count visits from pollinators to flowers. Ecologists study the structure and function of these networks for scientific, conservation, and agricultural purposes. However, little research has been done to understand the underlying mechanisms that determine pairwise interactions or to predict new links from networks describing the species community. This paper explores the use of latent factor models to predict interactions that will occur in new contexts (e.g. a different distribution of the set of plant species) based on an observed network. The analysis draws on algorithms and evaluation strategies developed for recommendation systems and introduces them to this new domain. The matrix factorization methods compare favorably against several baselines on a pollination dataset collected in montane meadows over several years. Incorporating both positive and negative implicit feedback into the matrix factorization methods is particularly promising.

Predicting Links in Plant-Pollinator Interaction Networks Using Latent Factor Models With Implicit Feedback

Plant-pollinator interaction networks are bipartite networks representing the mutualistic interactions between a set of plant species and a set of pollinator species. Data on these networks are collected by field biologists, who count visits from pollinators to flowers. Ecologists study the structure and function of these networks for scientific, conservation, and agricultural purposes. However, little research has been done to understand the underlying mechanisms that determine pairwise interactions or to predict new links from networks describing the species community. This paper explores the use of latent factor models to predict interactions that will occur in new contexts (e.g. a different distribution of the set of plant species) based on an observed network. The analysis draws on algorithms and evaluation strategies developed for recommendation systems and introduces them to this new domain. The matrix factorization methods compare favorably against several baselines on a pollination dataset collected in montane meadows over several years. Incorporating both positive and negative implicit feedback into the matrix factorization methods is particularly promising.

Models of Coupled Settlement and Habitat Networks for Biodiversity Conservation: Conceptual Framework, Implementation and Potential Applications

Worldwide, the expansion of settlement and transport infrastructure is one of the most important proximate as well as ultimate causes of biodiversity loss. As much as every modern human society depends on a network of settlements that is well-connected by transport infrastructure (i.e. settlement network), animal and plant species depend on networks of habitats between which they can move (i.e. habitat networks). However, changes to a settlement network in a region often threaten the integrity of the region’s habitat networks. Determining plans and policy to prevent these threats is made difficult by the numerous interactions and feedbacks that exist between and within the settlement and habitat networks. Mathematical models of coupled settlement and habitat networks can help us understand the dynamics of this social-ecological system. Yet, few attempts have been made to develop such mathematical models. In this paper, we promote the development of models of coupled settlement and habitat networks for biodiversity conservation. First, we present a conceptual framework of key variables that are ideally considered when operationalising the coupling of settlement and habitat networks. In this framework, we first describe important network-internal interactions by differentiating between the structural (i.e. relating to purely physical conditions determining the suitability of a location for living or movement) and functional (i.e. relating to the actual presence, abundance or movement of people or other organisms) properties of either network. We then describe the main one-way influences that a settlement network can exert on the habitat networks and vice versa. Second, we give several recommendations for the mathematical modelling of coupled settlement and habitat networks and present several existing modelling approaches (e.g. habitat network models and land-use transport interaction models) that could be used for this purpose. Lastly, we elaborate on potential application of models of coupled settlement and habitat networks in the development of complex network theory, in the assessment of system resilience and in conservation, transport and urban planning. The development of coupled settlement and habitat network models is important to gain a better system-level understanding of biodiversity conservation under a rapidly urbanising and growing human population.

Fine-Scale Evaluation of Giant Panda Habitats and Countermeasures against the Future Impacts of Climate Change and Human Disturbance (2015–2050): A Case Study in Ya’an, China

The accelerating impact of climate change on giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) habitats have become an international research topic. Recently, many studies have also focused on medium-sized mountain ranges or entire giant panda habitats to predict how habitats will change as the climate warms, but few say in detail what to do or where to focus efforts. To fill this gap, this paper presents a new method to take comprehensive, fine-scale evaluations incorporating climate change, human disturbance, and current conservation networks and translate them into practical countermeasures in order to help decision-makers set priority regions for conservation. This study looked at the core area of the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Natural Heritage site, namely Ya’an Prefecture, as a case study. The research employs the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) modeling algorithm to analyze how climate change will affect the habitats by 2050 under two scenarios: only considering the influence of climate change, and thinking about the coupled influence of climate change and human disturbance together. The results showed the following: (1) only considering climate change, the overall habitat that can be used by giant pandas in this region will increase, which differs from most of the previous results showing a decrease; (2) the new suitable habitat will shift westward, northward and eastward in this region; (3) conversely, the suitable habitat will be significantly reduced (about 58.56%) and fragmentized when taking into account human disturbance factors; (4) at present, the three small nature reserves are far from each other and cannot cover the present habitat well nor protect the potentially suitable habitats. Based on the comprehensive analysis of habitat shifts and our two field investigations, we suggest two regions that can be expanded into the conservation network to contain more potentially suitable habitats in the future. Furthermore, we used a geographical information system to incorporate high-resolution remote-sensing images from the GF-1 satellite, land-cover maps, and a digital elevation model (DEM) to verify the possibility of our two suggested regions.

<b>Rapid assessment of sacred groves: a biodiversity assessment tool for ground level practitioners</b>

Sacred groves in the Western Ghats are culturally preserved patches of forests that are rich in diversity owing to protection by several generations of local people, providing excellent examples of community based conservation. Sacred groves harbour local populations, preserve genetic resources and serve as reference sites and corridors between protected areas. They are considered to be cornerstones of biodiversity conservation, but are insufficient in scale and number to significantly address many aspects of the management of landscapes and biodiversity. We studied 13 sacred groves in Pune District that are at present outside the protected areas of the northern Western Ghats, where we employed a simple and rapid biodiversity assessment technique that can be replicated by frontline foresters, local residents and Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs). Integrating these sacred sites into the conservation network through local support can improve the efficiency for the existing protected area network in this ecologically fragile region.

PFstats: A Network-Based Open Tool for Protein Family Analysis.

PFstats is a software developed for the extraction of useful information from protein multiple sequence alignments. By analyzing positional conservation and residue coevolution networks, the software allows the identification of structurally and functionally important residue groups and the discovery of probable functional subclasses. Furthermore, it contains tools for the identification of the possible biological significance of these findings. PFstats contains methods for maximizing the significance of alignments through filtering and weighting, residue conservation and coevolution analysis, automatic UniprotKb queries for residue-position annotation and many possible data visualization methods.

Efficiency of protected areas in Amazon and Atlantic Forest conservation: A spatio-temporal view

The Amazon and Atlantic Forest are considered the world's most biodiverse biomes. Human and climate change impacts are the principal drivers of species loss in both biomes, more severely in the Atlantic Forest. In response to species loss, the main conservation action is the creation of protected areas (PAs). Current knowledge and research on the PA network's conservation efficiency is scarce, and existing studies have mainly considered a past temporal view. In this study, we tested the efficiency of the current PA network to maintain climatically stable areas (CSAs) across the Amazon and Atlantic Forest. To this, we used an ecological niche modeling approach to biome and paleoclimatic simulations. We propose three categories of conservation priority areas for both biomes, considering CSAs, PAs and intact forest remnants. The biomes vary in their respective PA networks' protection efficiency. Regarding protect CSAs, the Amazon PA network is four times more efficient than the Atlantic Forest PA network. New conservation efforts in these two forest biomes require different approaches. We discussed the conservation actions that should be taken in each biome to increase the efficiency of the PA network, considering both the creation and expansion of PAs as well as restoration programs.

How to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8 in Europe: priority-setting for seed banking of native threatened plants

The contribution of the European Native Seed Conservation Network (ENSCONET, 2004-2009) and the ENSCONET Consortium (since 2010) towards meeting the 2020 Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) target 8 was assessed in 2017. While the outcome was positive (62.7% of European threatened species already conserved ex situ in seed banks), the analysis showed that it was essential to provide guidance on which European native threatened species should be collected as a priority if the target was to be reached by 2020. In this paper we present a priority-setting method and its result, designed to guide collecting strategies across Europe to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8. The result of our study is a country-based checklist of European threatened taxa to be collected and stored ex situ across the seed banks of the ENSCONET Consortium by 2020. After discussing the results of the applied method, the ENSCONET Consortium Steering Committee has identified some key action points to support the implementation of such a collecting strategy across Europe in order to meet the 2020 GSPC target 8 for Europe.

Development of an Integrated Technique for Energy and Property Integration in Batch Processes

This paper presented a new technique for targeting minimum total annual cost of property-based heat integrated resource conservation networks (HIRCNs) for batch processes. This new technique takes in consideration of simultaneously heat and property integration with an objective to minimize the usage of fresh resources and energy utilities prior to the detailed network design. It is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) mathematical model for HIRCNs which consists of property-based resource conservation network (RCN) and heat exchanger network (HEN) models. The property-based RCN model is formulated based on a supertargeting approach while the HEN model is developed via automated targeting approach. Two case studies were used to demonstrate the proposed model’s applicability and advantages. Moreover, comparisons of the results for the proposed model for HIRCN with storage system and without storage system as well as sequential targeting approach are also addressed.