Brooks et al., 2006 - global conservation priorities

Question 1

Why are global conservation priorities needed?

Answer 1

• biodiversity is unevenly distributed
• some areas of more importance than others
• often most threatened and poorest
• nine templates for global prioritisation
• irreplaceability vs vulnerability (high/low)
• proactive vs reactive

Question 2

What are the nine templates for global conservation priorities?

Answer 2

• high biodiversity wilderness areas
• biodiversity hot spots
• global 200 ecosystems
• last of the wild
• frontier forests
• endemic bird areas
• crisis ecoregions
• centres of plant biodiversity
• megadiversity countries

vary in cover from less than 10% to over a third of earth

Question 3

How is irreplaceability used to determine global conservation priorities?

Answer 3

• usually measured as bird or plant endemism
• bird distributions mapped as part of IUCN effort
• more endemism = more biodiversity lost if habitat destroyed/degraded
• also taxonomic uniqueness/unusual phenomena/global rarity of habitat type
• harder to measure
• 6 out of 9 strategies incorporate irreplaceability

Question 4

Why isn’t species richness alone used to determine priorities?

Answer 4

• patterns of species richness driven by common & widespread species
• strategies focused on species richness tend to miss biodiversity needing conservation

Question 5

How is vulnerability used to determine global conservation priorities?

Answer 5

four types of vulnerability measure:

• environmental and spatial (used most frequently)
• land tenure (measured as protected area coverage)
• threatened species (none use!!!)
• expert opinion (subjective)

habitat loss is problematic:

• difficult to assess with remote systems
• does not incorporate threats
• retrospective rather than predictive
• reactive (prioritizing low vulnerability)
• proactive (prioritizing high vulnerability)

Question 6

What are limitations of global conservation priorities?

Answer 6

• doesn’t factor in climate change or cost

- global prioritisation has had little success in informing conservation strategies thus far

Question 7

What is good about global conservation strategies?

Answer 7

• some regions are consistently priorities for biodiversity conservation
  e. g. tropics, mediterranean-type
• global conservation planning key for strategic allocation of flexible resources
• influence global donors to invest in conservation