Developing a rapid assessment tool to promote voluntary private land conservation in productive landscapes

(Poster)

Verónica Etchebarne Palla
Vida Silvestre Uruguay, Uruguay
,
Magdalena Carabio
Vida Silvestre Uruguay, Uruguay
,
Mariana Ríos
Sistema Nacional de Áreas Protegidas, Ministerio de Vivienda, Ordenamiento Territorial y Medio Ambiente, Uruguay, Uruguay
,
Gustavo Garibotto
Sistema Nacional de Áreas Protegidas, Ministerio de Vivienda, Ordenamiento Territorial y Medio Ambiente, Uruguay., Uruguay
,
Gonzalo Cortés Capano
gonzalo.cortescapano@helsinki.fi

Digital Geography Lab, Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki. Vida Silvestre Uruguay., Finland

DOI: 10.17011/conference/eccb2018/108158

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Conservation assessments and biodiversity monitoring are key for adaptive management and are part of any conservation policy. However, designing and implementing comprehensive and affordable assessment programs remains a challenge, particularly in contexts with limited resources for conservation. Rapid assessments (RA) tools have been developed worldwide to address this challenge and support decision making. However, these tools generally require accurate ecological information and a significant allocation of resources to cover technical and implementation expenses. In addition, many of the RA tools are only focused on biodiversity, whereas in productive landscapes, agronomic information and landowners perspectives are also key for the success of the tools. In Uruguay, the National System of Protected Areas (SNAP) covers only ~1% of the land, while more than 90% of the land is privately owned and under different production regimes. Therefore, there is a need to develop and implement voluntary private land conservation strategies to complement protected areas. In order to assess the effectiveness and compliance of these strategies at the management unit level (i.e. private property), the SNAP and the national NGO Vida Silvestre Uruguay worked collaboratively to develop a RA tool, appropriate for the social-ecological and institutional contexts. First, we conducted a global systematic literature review to assess the evidence on RA tools, addressing the peer reviewed and the grey literature. We also conducted workshops with decision makers and NGO staff to understand the main needs and opportunities for the RA tool to be implemented. We then conducted expert elicitations with biodiversity and agronomic production specialists to identify a suite of appropriate ecosystem conservation indicators and their ranges, following the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation approach. Considering that the implementation of conservation actions on private land depends mostly on landowners’ willingness to collaborate, we also consulted cattle ranching landowners to include their perspectives and to identify opportunities for win-win scenarios. The ranges were then built identifying acceptable values both for biodiversity conservation and for cattle ranching, with the aim to promote sustainable use of native ecosystems and to increase landowners’ involvement. Finally, we conducted field surveys using the RA in a priority area for conservation in Uruguay to adjust and test the indicators and their ranges in a traditional cattle ranching region. As a result, our RA integrates public biodiversity databases, field data and landowners’ perspectives to support decision making. It can be applied by a broad set of stakeholders, with limited resources, in a short period of time. This tool will be tested in different regions of the country and can potentially inform the development of RA to assess and promote conservation in productive landscapes in other countries.

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INTRO:
Assessing conservation value is an essential part of conservation policy. Rapid assessments or RA tools are developed to facilitate conservation decision making, but they are often resource consuming and focused to assess just biodiversity features. However, in productive landscapes and in areas that are largely owned by private landowners, social issues such as landowners' perspectives are as important as biodiversity representation. This abstract describes the process that led to the development of an RA tool, which can be applied by different stakeholders with a limited amount of time and other resources. The tool combines knowledge and perspectives of experts, stakeholders, decision makers and landowners, and public biodiversity databases.
MERITS:
The authors have done a huge work in developing the RA tool: reviewing scientific and grey literature about RA tools, organizing workshops together with NGO, making use of experts' and landowners' perspectives, designing ranges where biodiversity values and cattle ranching would be possible to integrate, and finally testing the RA tool in practice. The work is worth of presentation in ECCB2018 as it aims to facilitate conservation in complex situations, where many land-use practices compete with each other, land is largely owned by private owners, protected area is very small, and biodiversity values are great. The study is ambitious and aims to tackle the practical challenges of adaptive management.
CRITIQUE:
It seems that the abstract includes several studies that could be divided in separate papers. This would enable more accurate descriptions of technical and practical parts of the tool, results of the literature review, and testing the tool in the field.
DISCUSSION:
Adaptive management, participating negotiations and voluntary actions are present-day conservation measures. Nowadays successful conservation is not just monitoring biodiversity features and making decisions based on their distribution and representation, but also listening the needs of landowners and other stakeholders. However, not many RA tools have been designed to combine biodiversity and societal perspectives. Hence, this study goes in the vanguard of modern RA tools.

I would like to hear more about the actual ecosystem indicators: what are they, why the authors think they are the best ones and how easy it would be adapt them to other regions or even to other countries. Another point invoking questions is the utilization of public biodiversity databases. How dependent the RA tool is on already existing, apparently freely available biodiversity data, and how much this affects costs of utilizing the tool? It would be also interesting to hear about the details of the tool such as how reconciliation of biodiversity and stakeholders' needs is technically done, how much work is needed to compose wide enough image about stakeholders' opinions, and how stakeholders are and should be chosen.