Status: Naidoo et al. Global Mapping of Ecosystem Services and Conservation Priorities Flashcards
What is the overall goal?
To be able to effectively integrate ecosystem services into planned or existing conservation programs, need to more broadly evaluate the spatial concordance between areas that produce ecosystem services and those that support biodiversity
What is meant by “ecosystem services”?
The goods and services from ecological systems that benefit people e.g. water purification, carbon sequestration and crop pollination.
Relatively new focus in conservation
Name the four ecosystem services Naidoo et al. map proxies for
1) Carbon sequestration
2) Carbon storage
3) Grassland production of livestock
4) Water provision
What is carbon sequestration? Limitation?
The net annual rate of atmospheric carbon added to existing biomass carbon pools, helping to slow global climate change
Main limitation is that it is model-based, not observational, and therfore depends heavily on the assumptions, input variables, and time scales that defined the particular TEM simulation used
What is carbon storage? What are the limitations?
The amount of carbon stored in vegetation (both aboveground and belowground) and, therefore, an avoided flow of carbon into the atmosphere
Main limitations of this proxy measure are that it is based on data that were originally published more than 20 years ago and that the original measures only coincide with 18 biome types that are mapped globally and assigned a single carbon value
What is grassland production of livestock? And what is the challange?
Annual production of livestock derived, at least in part, from grazing on unimproved natural grasslands
Limitation: problems associated with mapping of pastures from remotely sensed imagery (e.g., it is difficult to determine from remote sensing whether grqsslands have been “improve” by the introduction of nonnative species) and the lack of spatially explicit weightings that would reflect differences in the economic value of livestock species in different regions of the world
What is water provision amd what limitations are connected with it?
Used for irrigation, industry, domestic consumption, and livestock production.
It ignores both spatial variation and in water value (depending on scarcity and type of use) and, crucially, changw in water provision resulting fom land use change. Hydrological responses to changes in vegetation are complex and controversial; our global surface, therefore show only where any such changes would impact the most water as currently provided
What measures of biodiveristy was used?
Ecoregion distribution data for mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian species as measure of biodiversity, conducting seperate analyses for each taxonomic group
What are the main results found in the comparison between ecosystem services and biodiversity?
Overall lack of spetial concordance between biodiversity and ecosystem services.
On averge for all taxa, we found that (for levels up to 90% of species representation) optimizing for individual ecosystem swrvices conserved only 22-35% as many species for a given area as did optimizing for species, that is, no more than were conserved by selecting ecoregions at random (Fig. 1A)
Maximizing species representation for a given area captured only 17-53% of maximum ecosystem service provision depending on which serive was considered and at which area kimit the comparison was made. These levels of ecosystem service capture from species optimization were, again, no greater than those from a random selection (Fig. 1B)
How effectively do existing priority areas conserve ecosystem services?
The relative performance of the three prioritizationschemes varied markedly across the four ecosystem services (Fig. 2)
Biodiversity hotspots, HBWAs (high-biodiversity wilderness areas) and global 200 ecoregions
For all four services, Global 200 ecoregions offered intermediate levels of ecosystem service provision that were near global averages
How was biodiversity/ecosystem importance defined?
Biodiveristy importance: number of endemic vertebrate species adjusted for are
Ecosystem importance: carbon storage alone
Where were win-win ecoregions located?
Tropical forested regions, whereas deserts and tundra regions had low priotiry for both carbon storage and biodiversity
Can this be used tomexamine both on global patterns and at a smaller scale?
Fig. 3. Less than one-quater of the planning units within it represent win-win at more local scales (Fig. 4). Hence, even win-win ecoregions can contain areas that represent trade-offs between conservation and ecosystem services. By extension, ecoregions in quadrants 1-3 (Fig. 3) will almost certainly contain local win-wins at more local scales (e.g. pollination by wild insects) are considered. Although scale analyss will be essential for targeting specific conservation action, global analyses remain useful for identifying broad areas where taking such actions is most likely to benefit people
Limitations to the study?
Data availability severely limited analyses. For the four ecosystem services we assessed, we were only able to assemble data on the first three elements that are needed for a comprehensive assessment.
Data limitations likely affected the comparative results
Two out of four services (carbon storage and sequestration) peak in tropical and temperate forests and are, therefore, biased away from ecoregions with high vertebrate endemism, which are often island or montane areas
Why is it important?
Human welfare is linked in diverse ways to biodiversity conservation and sustainable development should involve managing of both
