Protected area connectivity shortfalls and country-level priorities: global and European insights

Abstract

Connectivity of protected areas (PAs) is crucial for meeting their conservation goals. We evaluate the progress of all countries towards Aichi Target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which is to have at least 17% of the land covered by well-connected PA systems by 2020. We globally quantify how well the terrestrial PA systems of countries are designed to promote connectivity, using the Protected Connected (ProtConn) indicator [1]. In this global analysis, we focus in the part of the PA connectivity that is in the power of a country to influence, i.e. not penalizing countries for PA isolation due to the sea and to foreign lands.

We found that globally only 7.5% of the area of the countries is covered by protected connected lands, which is about half of the global PA coverage of 14.7% and below the 17% level of Aichi Target 11. Only about a third of the countries (both globally and in Europe) currently meet the Aichi Target 11 connectivity element. These findings suggest the need for considerable efforts to improve PA connectivity.

We further identify the main priorities for improving or sustaining PA connectivity in each country: general increase of PA coverage, targeted designation of PAs in strategic locations for connectivity, ensuring permeability of the unprotected landscapes between PAs, coordinated management of neighbouring PAs within the country, and/or transnational coordination with PAs in other countries. By doing so, we help to highlight important strengths and weaknesses of the design of PA systems for connectivity in the world's countries and regions.

The detailed results of the ProtConn indicator are made available through the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission [2], which can be accessed at http://dopa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/.

We conclude indicating some directions for potential further development of the ProtConn indicator and related analyses, which consist in (i) assessing the effect of the heterogeneity of unprotected landscapes using naturalness as a proxy for permeability, and (ii) assessing conservation management effectiveness of PAs for connectivity.

References

[1] Saura, S., Bertzky, B., Bastin, L., Battistella, L., Mandrici, A., Dubois, G. 2018. Protected area connectivity: shortfalls in global targets and country-level priorities. Biological Conservation, DOI 10.1016/j.biocon.2017.12.020.

[2] Dubois, G., Bastin, L., Bertzky, B., Mandrici, A., Conti, M., Saura, S., Cottam, A., Battistella, L., Martínez-López, J., Boni, M., Graziano, M., 2016. Integrating multiple spatial datasets to assess protected areas: Lessons learnt from the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA). ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 5, 242.