Protected area effectiveness and management indicators do not correlate: what are we doing wrong?

Abstract

Protected areas are one of the key tools for conserving biodiversity and recent studies have highlighted the impact they can have in avoiding habitat conversion, finding that protected areas in general are effective, yet that this varies with governance regimes (Schleicher et al. 2017) and over time (Eklund et al. 2016). However, the relationship to management actions on the ground is far less studied (Coad et al. 2015) and we currently do not know which management actions are crucial for success. To investigate this in a challenging socio-ecological environment, we studied the effectiveness of the protected area network of Madagascar; a country with high deforestation rates and an unstable political environment. We computed the effectiveness 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 (PAME) scores, and their different facets, explained the variation observed. We found that the majority of the analyzed protected areas in Madagascar do reduce deforestation, but the levels of deforestation they manage to avoid are small. Protected areas with higher management scores did not perform better in terms of avoiding deforestation. Yet, instead of suggesting that management is ineffective or that PAME is not a good indicator of management effectiveness, we present a novel framework that uses a combination of deforestation measures and can clarify why no correlations have been found, in this study and elsewhere.

References

Coad, L. et al. 2015. Measuring impact of protected area management interventions: current and future use of the Global Database of Protected Area Management Effectiveness. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370:20140281.

Eklund, J. et al. 2016. Contrasting spatial and temporal trends of protected area effectiveness in mitigating deforestation in Madagascar. Biological Conservation 203: 290-297.

Schleicher, J. et al. 2017. Conservation performance of different conservation governance regimes in the Peruvian Amazon. Scientific Reports 7: 11318.