Lecture 8: Protected Areas

Question 1

What is the total global land area currently protected?

Answer 1

• 14.6%
  - >30 million km squared of land
  - >2 million km squared at sea

Question 2

What is the world’s largest park and how much area does it cover?

Answer 2

Greenland is home to the world’s largest park at 970,000 km squared, which is ~3% of the global area protected

Question 3

What are the 6 categories of protected areas that the IUCN recognizes?

Answer 3

• Ia - Strict nature reserves
• Ib - Wilderness areas
• II - National parks
• III - Natural monuments
• IV - Habitat/species management areas
• V - Protected landscapes/seascapes
• VI - Protected areas with sustainable use of natural resources

Question 4

How many of the areas in the 6 IUCN categories have been designated worldwide?

Answer 4

• 160,000 areas in these categories have been designated worldwide
  - ~6% of the Earth’s surface is in categories I-IV

Question 5

Which areas of productivity are protected to a greater extent?

Answer 5

• *Areas of low productivity tend to be protected to a greater extent than areas of high productivity
  - E.g., 80% of North American grasslands have been converted to agriculture
• *Areas of low biodiversity tend to be protected to a greater extent than areas of high biodiversity
  - E.g., in the UK, high elevation sites are over represented among protected areas (because less useful to people and therefore more likely to get protected)

Question 6

Where are most protected areas located?

Answer 6

• Most protected areas are in suboptimal places
• these places may be more likely to remain undisturbed even in the absence of protection
• one solution is to ‘match’ protected areas to similar unprotected areas
  - e.g., in Costa Rica, only 7-9% of the forest cover would have been lost from protected areas had they not been protected

Question 7

What is leakage?

Answer 7

• Leakage is the displacement of an activity, such as fishing or hunting, from a recently protected area to an unprotected area
  - E.g., as Europe and Asia have reduced harvest levels for commercial fisheries, large fishing vessels have moved to less-protected African waters
• ultimate conservation goals are not met

Question 8

What is ecosystem management?

Answer 8

• a system of large-scale management involving multiple stakeholders, the primary goal of which is preserving ecosystem components and processes for the long term while still satisfying the current needs of society
  - encompasses large geographic scales
  - especially important in the face of climate change
  - tasked with maximizing goods and services but at the expense of biodiversity

Question 9

What does ecosystem management link?

Answer 9

Ecosystem management links private and public landowners, businesses, and conservation organizations in a planning framework that facilitates acting together on a larger scale

Question 10

Who are the Malpai Borderlands Group?

Answer 10

They are a cooperative organization of local landowners, ranchers, and non-profits - situated on the NM-AZ border

Question 11

What are some important themes of ecosystem management?

Answer 11

• using the best available science to develop a coordinated plan that is sustainable
• ensuring viable populations of all species, biological communities, and successional stages
• seeking and understanding connections between all levels and scales in the ecosystem hierarchy
• monitoring significant components of the ecosystem to adjust management in an adaptive manner

Question 12

What are no-take zones?

Answer 12

no extraction is allowed, and nothing is allowed to be harvested

Question 13

What percentage of coastal (territorial) waters are protected? Why are they especially important?

Answer 13

~6%

• these areas are especially important
  - breeding grounds
  - nurseries
  - fisheries
  - recreation
  - tourism

Question 14

What are the four categories under the IUCN that are the most strict and No-take areas?

Answer 14

• The first four categories are no-take areas and are the most strict
• Ia, Ib, II, and III

Question 15

Which categories under the IUCN are more human involved?

Answer 15

• The last 3 are less strict and are more human involved

- IV, V, and VI

Question 16

What is a paper park?

Answer 16

• They exist very nicely on paper but property boundaries are in dispute, so not a lot of law enforcement of the areas
• i.e. Brazil sets a good job on doing the written part but awful enforcing it in the field on the land

Question 17

Protected Areas

Answer 17

• areas of greatest conservation need are not always those that get protection
• the extent to which different countries protect land varies greatly
  - tends to be greatest among developed nations

Question 18

Although the amount of land under protection globally has grown rapidly in the 50 years, the rate of growth has slowed considerably the last few years. What could be some possible causes for this?

Answer 18

• easiest places to protect are already protected
• many nations are downsizing their protected areas - 543 instances spanning 57 nations
• possibly countries may not have the money anymore to be setting aside conservation areas so possibly why they are downsizing their protected areas

Question 19

Panacea

Answer 19

silver bullet, “cure-all”

Question 20

Despite the widespread approach of using protected area designation as a means to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services, protected areas are not a panacea

Answer 20

• introduced species
• altered fire regimes
• global climate change
• pollution
• expansive species ranges/migration

Question 21

What do most protected areas require?

Answer 21

Most protected areas require active monitoring, enforcement, and management

Question 22

What are some examples of studies on the effectiveness of parks in protecting species diversity?

Answer 22

1. a study of 93 protected areas in 22 tropical countries revealed that most protected areas retained or increased vegetation cover
2. over the past 30 yrs, Kenya’s wildlife populations have declines just as rapidly inside as outside protected areas
3. in a study of 60 protected areas in the tropics, researchers interviewed 262 scientists about the status of biodiversity in parks and concluded about half the reserves are experiencing declines
4. surveys of vegetation cover inside vs outside protected areas revealed that about 25% of reserves suffered a loss of vegetative cover inside their boundaries

Question 23

what confirmed the Costa Rica study?

Answer 23

• follow up studies using all 147 countries with >100km squared confirmed the finding
• plotted matched and unmatched difference against each other - anywhere above the line you are not accomplishing the conservation goals that you think you are accomplishing
• basically it looks like we are not protecting as much as we think we are protecting in these protected areas

Question 24

Are marine protected areas proportionally much less protected than terrestrial habitats?

Answer 24

Yes, only 1.17% of world’s oceans protected as of 2010

Question 25

As of 2006, how much have no-take zones of the oceans covered?

Answer 25

no-take zones covered 0.08% of the world’s oceans

- compared with 4% of land area receiving IUCN category I & II protection

Question 26

What are some of the varied levels of protection that marine protected areas receive?

Answer 26

• some reserves allow fishing an other commercial activities

- others are no-take zones

Question 27

Why are the coastal (territorial waters areas especially important?

Answer 27

These areas are especially important

• breeding grounds
• nurseries
• fisheries
• recreation
• tourism