How to protect nature – Boreal mire conservation in Finland

Abstract

Nature’s resources enable the existence of humankind. Due to our very intensive resource extraction, many ecosystem functions are deteriorating and species’ populations, distributions, and assemblages changing, which jeopardize our contemporary societies. Conservation areas effectively slow down these trajectories. However, conservation benefits and costs are often incommensurable, and spatially and temporally unevenly distributed, so their reliable evaluation is complex. I studied how conservation decision-making could produce ecologically, socially, and economically effective and acceptable conservation solutions. I implemented the study in the context of boreal mire conservation network complementation in Finland. Mires need to be set aside as spatially and functionally continuous entities to safeguard their hydrology and long-term existence. In Finland, mires are mostly privately owned and landownership is fragmented within single mires. As a result, conflicts could not be avoided. However, trade-offs between ecological gains, landowners’ conservation preferences, and conservation costs could have been alleviated, if alternative conservation solutions were recognized, their consequences studied, and some of the current legislation revised. Furthermore, not all assumed conflicts proved to be true since landowners of wooded mires did not engage in systematic pre-emptive loggings. The results also show that spatial prioritization methods can fill the science-practice gap by supporting conservation planning and decision-making in diverse ways. They can serve simultaneously as site selection tools and as platforms to decision-making, enhancing sharing and analytical use of expert knowledge. They also allow quantification of interrelationships between different conservation-related factors, which enables informing decision-makers about the consequences of alternative conservation solutions. Boreal mire conservation in Finland reflects the very same challenges than nature conservation around the world, so its solutions can help to resolve global conservation problems. Keywords: Conservation decision-making; involuntary conservation; peatland; pre-emptive behavior; trade-offs; voluntary conservation; Zonation.