Application of Modified Threat Reduction Assessments in Lebanon

Abstract: Worldwide efforts have concentrated on developing monitoring methods that would enhance the assessment of progress toward achieving the 2010 conservation objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Threat reduction assessment is one such method. It provides an indirect measure of the effects of a conservation project by evaluating changes in human‐induced direct threats to protected areas. We applied modified threat reduction assessments and the 2008 International Union for Conservation of Nature standardized lexicon for classification of threats to Horsh Ehden and Al‐Shouf Cedar nature reserves in Lebanon. Our goal was in part to test the suitability of this tool for improving monitoring and management effectiveness of protected forests in Lebanon. In Horsh Ehden, composite threats decreased by 24% from 1997 to 2002, and then increased from 2002 to 2009 by 78% in the core area of the reserve and by 118% in the reserve's buffer zone (surrounds core area, conservation and recreational activities allowed). In Al‐Shouf Cedar reserve threats decreased by 51% from 2006 to 2009. Management teams from both reserves have integrated the use of this method to prioritize actions for new management plans. We believe that in Lebanon and other countries with limited resources and weak monitoring programs or that are experiencing political instability threat reduction assessments could be used to improve the effectiveness of protected areas management.     

Biodiversity Conservation in Local Planning

Abstract:  Local land-use policy is increasingly being recognized as fundamental to biodiversity conservation in the United States. Many planners and conservation scientists have called for broader use of planning and regulatory tools to support the conservation of biodiversity at local scales. Yet little is known about the pervasiveness of these practices. We conducted an on-line survey of county, municipal, and tribal planning directors (n = 116 ) in 3 geographic regions of the United States: metropolitan Seattle, Washington; metropolitan Des Moines, Iowa; and the Research Triangle, North Carolina. Our objectives were to gauge the extent to which local planning departments address biodiversity conservation and to identify factors that facilitate or hinder conservation actions in local planning. We found that biodiversity conservation was seldom a major consideration in these departments. Staff time was mainly devoted to development mandates and little time was spent on biodiversity conservation. Regulations requiring conservation actions that might benefit biodiversity were uncommon, with the exception of rules governing water quality in all 3 regions and the protection of threatened and endangered species in the Seattle region. Planning tools that could enhance habitat conservation were used infrequently. Collaboration across jurisdictions was widespread, but rarely focused on conservation. Departments with a conservation specialist on staff tended to be associated with higher levels of conservation actions. Jurisdictions in the Seattle region also reported higher levels of conservation action, largely driven by state and federal mandates. Increased funding was most frequently cited as a factor that would facilitate greater consideration of biodiversity in local planning. There are numerous opportunities for conservation biologists to play a role in improving conservation planning at local scales.     

Conservation Focus on Europe: Major Conservation Policy Issues That Need to Be Informed by Conservation Science

Abstract:  Europe is one of the world's most densely populated continents and has a long history of human-dominated land- and seascapes. Europe is also at the forefront of developing and implementing multinational conservation efforts. In this contribution, we describe some top policy issues in Europe that need to be informed by high-quality conservation science. These include evaluation of the effectiveness of the Natura 2000 network of protected sites, implications of rapid economic and subsequent land-use change in Central and Eastern Europe, conservation of marine biodiversity and sustainability of fisheries, the effect of climate change on movement of species in highly fragmented landscapes, and attempts to assess the economic value of ecosystem services and biodiversity. Broad policy issues such as those identified are not easily amenable to scientific experiment. A key challenge at the science–policy interface is to identify the research questions underlying these problem areas so that conservation science can provide evidence to underpin future policy development .     

A Freshwater Classification Approach for Biodiversity Conservation Planning

Abstract:  Freshwater biodiversity is highly endangered and faces increasing threats worldwide. To be complete, regional plans that identify critical areas for conservation must capture representative components of freshwater biodiversity as well as rare and endangered species. We present a spatially hierarchical approach to classify freshwater systems to create a coarse filter to capture representative freshwater biodiversity in regional conservation plans. The classification framework has four levels that we described using abiotic factors within a zoogeographic context and mapped in a geographic information system. Methods to classify and map units are flexible and can be automated where high-quality spatial data exist, or can be manually developed where such data are not available. Products include a spatially comprehensive inventory of mapped and classified units that can be used remotely to characterize regional patterns of aquatic ecosystems. We provide examples of classification procedures in data-rich and data-poor regions from the Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwest of North America and the upper Paraguay River in central South America. The approach, which has been applied in North, Central, and South America, provides a relatively rapid and pragmatic way to account for representative freshwater biodiversity at scales appropriate to regional assessments.     

The Questionable Effectiveness of Science Spending by International Conservation Organizations in the Tropics

Abstract:  The general context of conservation in the tropics—in the Amazon basin and elsewhere—is stagnant or declining funding and rapidly growing threat levels. For conservation programs this makes strategic deployment of limited conservation resources all the more important. International conservation organizations active in the tropics increasingly define themselves as science driven and expend considerable resources on science-based activities such as ecoregional analysis, field research, and monitoring of ecological variables. I argue that an overemphasis on science has generated a series of unintended but serious problems for conservation in the tropics. Spending on monitoring and ecoregional analysis has effectively starved protection and threat analysis of resources. A decoupling of biology from serious cost-benefit analysis has led to the privileging of small-scale and local analyses, rather than the systemic analyses essential for the strategic allocation of scarce conservation resources. Successful conservation in the tropics depends on the crossing of biogeography with sophisticated threat analysis to identify priority geographies for protection. This should be combined with much more systematic engagement with the principal drivers of tropical deforestation, especially agribusiness. Caution and a sense of proportion are required when balancing the financial demands of science and those of protection. I suggest that conservation organizations should cooperate far more in assembling and analyzing information on conservation spending and on threat levels and biogeography at the continental, national, and regional levels. Site selection should follow rather than precede this kind of strategic analysis, and sites should be considered elements of a network rather than stand-alone projects. More attention should be paid to market-driven conservation through techniques such as certification and responsible supply-chain management.     

Use of surrogate species to cost-effectively prioritize conservation actions

Conservation efforts often focus on umbrella species whose distributions overlap with many other flora and fauna. However, because biodiversity is affected by different threats that are spatially variable, focusing only on the geographic range overlap of species may not be sufficient in allocating the necessary actions needed to efficiently abate threats. We developed a problem-based method for prioritizing conservation actions for umbrella species that maximizes the total number of flora and fauna benefiting from management while considering threats, actions, and costs. We tested our new method by assessing the performance of the Australian federal government's umbrella prioritization list, which identifies 73 umbrella species as priorities for conservation attention. Our results show that the federal government priority list benefits only 6% of all Australia's threatened terrestrial species. This could be increased to benefit nearly half (or 46%) of all threatened terrestrial species for the same budget of AU$550 million/year if more suitable umbrella species were chosen. This results in a 7-fold increase in management efficiency. We believe nations around the world can markedly improve the selection of prioritized umbrella species for conservation action with this transparent, quantitative, and objective prioritization approach.     

Focus and social contagion of environmental organization advocacy on Twitter

Agriculture, overexploitation, and urbanization remain the major threats to biodiversity in the Anthropocene. The attention these threats garner among leading environmental nongovernmental organizations (eNGOs) and the wider public is critical in fostering the political will necessary to reverse biodiversity declines worldwide. I analyzed the advocacy of leading eNGOs on Twitter by scraping account timelines, screening content for advocacy relating to biodiversity threats and, for prevalent threats, further screening content for positive and negative emotional language with a sentiment lexicon. Twitter advocacy was dominated by the major threats of climate change and overexploitation and the minor threat of plastic pollution. The major threats of agriculture, urbanization, invasions, and pollution were rarely addressed. Content relating to overexploitation and plastic pollution was more socially contagious than other content. Increasing emotional negativity further increased social contagion, whereas increasing emotional positivity did not. Scientists, policy makers, and eNGOs should consider how narrowly focused advocacy on platforms like Twitter will contribute to effective global biodiversity conservation.     

Evaluating global interest in biodiversity and conservation

The first target of the Convention for Biological Diversity (Aichi target 1) was to increase public awareness of the values of biodiversity and actions needed to conserve it—a key prerequisite for other conservation targets. Monitoring success in achieving this target at a global scale has been difficult; however, increased digitization of human life in recent decades has made it easier to measure people's interests at an unprecedented scale and allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of Aichi target 1 than previously attempted. We used Google search volume data for over a thousand search terms related to different aspects of biodiversity and conservation to evaluate global interest in biodiversity and its conservation. We also investigated the correlation of interest in biodiversity and conservation across countries to variables related to biodiversity, economy, demography, research, education, internet use, and presence of environmental organizations. From 2013 to 2020, global searches for biodiversity components increased, driven mostly by searches for charismatic fauna (59% of searches were for mammal species). Searches for conservation actions, driven mostly by searches for national parks, decreased since 2019, likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Economic inequality was negatively correlated with interest in biodiversity and conservation, whereas purchasing power was indirectly positively correlated with higher levels of education and research. Our results suggest partial success toward achieving Aichi target 1 in that interest in biodiversity increased widely, but not for conservation. We suggest that increased outreach and education efforts aimed at neglected aspects of biodiversity and conservation are still needed. Popular topics in biodiversity and conservation could be leveraged to increase awareness of other topics with attention to local socioeconomic contexts.     

Limitations of outsourcing on‐the‐ground biodiversity conservation

To counteract global species decline, modern biodiversity conservation engages in large projects, spends billions of dollars, and includes many organizations working simultaneously within regions. To add to this complexity, the conservation sector has hierarchical structure, where conservation actions are often outsourced by funders (foundations, government, etc.) to local organizations that work on‐the‐ground. In contrast, conservation science usually assumes that a single organization makes resource allocation decisions. This discrepancy calls for theory to understand how the expected biodiversity outcomes change when interactions between organizations are accounted for. Here, we used a game theoretic model to explore how biodiversity outcomes are affected by vertical and horizontal interactions between 3 conservation organizations: a funder that outsourced its actions and 2 local conservation organizations that work on‐the‐ground. Interactions between the organizations changed the spending decisions made by individual organizations, and thereby the magnitude and direction of the conservation benefits. We showed that funders would struggle to incentivize recipient organizations with set priorities to perform desired actions, even when they control substantial amounts of the funding and employ common contracting approaches to enhance outcomes. Instead, biodiversity outcomes depended on priority alignment across the organizations. Conservation outcomes for the funder were improved by strategic interactions when organizational priorities were well aligned, but decreased when priorities were misaligned. Meanwhile, local organizations had improved outcomes regardless of alignment due to additional funding in the system. Given that conservation often involves the aggregate actions of multiple organizations with different objectives, strategic interactions between organizations need to be considered if we are to predict possible outcomes of conservation programs or costs of achieving conservation targets.     

Historical and contemporary indigenous marine conservation strategies in the North Pacific

Strategies to reduce, halt, and reverse global declines in marine biodiversity are needed urgently. We reviewed, coded, and synthesized historical and contemporary marine conservation strategies of the Kitasoo/Xai'xais First Nation in British Columbia, Canada to show how their approaches work. We assessed whether the conservation actions classification system by the Conservation Measures Partnership was able to encompass this nation's conservation approaches. All first-order conservation actions aligned with the Kitasoo/Xai'xais First Nation's historical and contemporary marine conservation actions; hereditary chief management responsibility played a key role. A conservation ethic permeates Kitasoo/Xai'xais culture, and indigenous resource management and conservation existed historically and remains strong despite extreme efforts by colonizers to suppress all indigenous practices. The Kitasoo/Xai'xais's embodiment of conservation actions as part of their worldview, rather than as requiring actions separate from everyday life (the norm in nonindigenous cultures), was missing from the conservation action classification system. The Kitasoo/Xai'xais are one of many indigenous peoples working to revitalize their governance and management authorities. With the Canadian government's declared willingness to work toward reconciliation, there is an opportunity to enable First Nations to lead on marine and other conservation efforts. Global conservation efforts would also benefit from enhanced support for indigenous conservation approaches, including expanding the conservation actions classification to encompass a new category of conservation or sacredness ethic.     

‘Development’ at the crossroads: biodiversity and land-use tensions on South Africa’s Wild Coast

In South Africa, extreme rural poverty often geographically overlaps with areas of high and important biodiversity. Attempts to bring about land-based poverty reduction projects in such areas tends to trigger tensions among stakeholders purporting to be concerned about local people’s welfare, as well as the environment. Using discursive document analysis and semi-structured interviews, the paper discusses a case study of the Wild Coast, an area celebrated for its high biodiversity and ‘beauty’, which reveals that a tension among environmental non-government organisations, government agencies and the private sector, on the best development option, exacerbates the threats to local livelihood options and biodiversity conservation.     

Priorities for Improving the Scientific Foundation of Conservation Policy in North America

Abstract:  The Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) can enhance conservation of biodiversity in North America by increasing its engagement in public policy. Toward this end, the North America Section of SCB is establishing partnerships with other professional organizations in order to speak more powerfully to decision makers and taking other actions—such as increasing interaction with chapters—geared to engage members more substantively in science-policy issues. Additionally, the section is developing a North American Biodiversity Blueprint, which spans the continental United States and Canada and is informed by natural and social science. This blueprint is intended to clarify the policy challenges for protecting continental biodiversity, to foster bilateral collaboration to resolve common problems, and to suggest rational alternative policies and practices that are more likely than current practices to sustain North America's natural heritage. Conservation scientists and practitioners can play a key role by drawing policy makers' attention to ultimate, as well as proximate, causes of biodiversity decline and to the ecological and economic consequences of not addressing these threats.     

How percentage-protected targets can support positive biodiversity outcomes

Global targets for the percentage area of land protected, such as 30% by 2030, have gained increasing prominence, but both their scientific basis and likely effectiveness have been questioned. As with emissions-reduction targets based on desired climate outcomes, percentage-protected targets combine values and science by estimating the area over which conservation actions are required to help achieve desired biodiversity outcomes. Protected areas are essential for achieving many biodiversity targets, in part because many species are highly sensitive to human-associated disturbance. However, because the contribution of protected areas to biodiversity outcomes is contingent on their location, management, governance, threats, and what occurs across the broader landscape matrix, global percentage-protected targets are unavoidably empirical generalizations of ecological patterns and processes across diverse geographies. Percentage-protected targets are insufficient in isolation but can complement other actions and contribute to biodiversity outcomes within a framework that balances accuracy and pragmatism in a global context characterized by imperfect biodiversity data. Ideally, percentage-protected targets serve as anchors that strengthen comprehensive national biodiversity strategies by communicating the level of ambition necessary to reverse current trends of biodiversity loss. If such targets are to fulfill this role within the complex societal process by which both values and science impel conservation actions, conservation scientists must clearly communicate the nature of the evidence base supporting percentage-protected targets and how protected areas can function within a broader landscape managed for sustainable coexistence between people and nature. A new paradigm for protected and conserved areas recognizes that national coordination, incentives, and monitoring should support rather than undermine diverse locally led conservation initiatives. However, the definition of a conserved area must retain a strong focus on biodiversity to remain consistent with the evidence base from which percentage-protected targets were originally derived.     

Use of Modified Threat Reduction Assessments to Estimate Success of Conservation Measures within and Adjacent to Kruger National Park,South Africa

Abstract: The importance of biodiversity as natural capital for economic development and sustaining human welfare is well documented. Nevertheless, resource degradation rates and persistent deterioration of human welfare in developing countries is increasingly worrisome. Developing effective monitoring and evaluation schemes and measuring biodiversity loss continue to pose unique challenges, particularly when there is a paucity of historical data. Threat reduction assessment (TRA) has been proposed as a method to measure conservation success and as a proxy measurement of conservation impact, monitoring threats to resources rather than changes to biological parameters themselves. This tool is considered a quick, practical alternative to more cost‐ and time‐intensive approaches, but has inherent weaknesses. I conducted TRAs to evaluate the effectiveness of Kruger National Park (KNP) and Limpopo Province, South Africa, in mitigating threats to biodiversity from 1994 to 2004 in 4 geographical areas. I calculated TRA index values in these TRAs by using the original scoring developed by Margoluis and Salafsky (2001) and a modified scoring system that assigned negative mitigation values to incorporate new or worsening threats. Threats were standardized to allow comparisons across the sites. Modified TRA index values were significantly lower than values derived from the original scoring exercise. Five of the 11 standardized threats were present in all 4 assessment areas, 2 were restricted to KNP, 2 to Limpopo Province, and 2 only to Malamulele municipality. These results indicate, first, the need to integrate negative mitigation values into TRA scoring. By including negative values, investigators will be afforded a more accurate picture of biodiversity threats and of temporal and spatial trends across sites. Where the original TRA scoring was used to measure conservation success, reevaluation of these cases with the modified scoring is recommended. Second, practitioners must carefully consider the need and consequences of generalizing threats into generic categories for comparative assessments. Finally, continued refinement of the methodology and its extension to facilitate the transfer of successful conservation strategies is needed.     

Freshwater fish diversity hotspots for conservation priorities in the Amazon Basin

Conserving freshwater habitats and their biodiversity in the Amazon Basin is a growing challenge in the face of rapid anthropogenic changes. We used the most comprehensive fish-occurrence database available (2355 valid species; 21,248 sampling points) and 3 ecological criteria (irreplaceability, representativeness, and vulnerability) to identify biodiversity hotspots based on 6 conservation templates (3 proactive, 1 reactive, 1 representative, and 1 balanced) to provide a set of alternative planning solutions for freshwater fish protection in the Amazon Basin. We identified empirically for each template the 17% of sub-basins that should be conserved and performed a prioritization analysis by identifying current and future (2050) threats (i.e., degree of deforestation and habitat fragmentation by dams). Two of our 3 proactive templates had around 65% of their surface covered by protected areas; high levels of irreplaceability (60% of endemics) and representativeness (71% of the Amazonian fish fauna); and low current and future vulnerability. These 2 templates, then, seemed more robust for conservation prioritization. The future of the selected sub-basins in these 2 proactive templates is not immediately threatened by human activities, and these sub-basins host the largest part of Amazonian biodiversity. They could easily be conserved if no additional threats occur between now and 2050.     

A strategy for the next decade to address data deficiency in neglected biodiversity

Measuring progress toward international biodiversity targets requires robust information on the conservation status of species, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species provides. However, data and capacity are lacking for most hyperdiverse groups, such as invertebrates, plants, and fungi, particularly in megadiverse or high-endemism regions. Conservation policies and biodiversity strategies aimed at halting biodiversity loss by 2020 need to be adapted to tackle these information shortfalls after 2020. We devised an 8-point strategy to close existing data gaps by reviving explorative field research on the distribution, abundance, and ecology of species; linking taxonomic research more closely with conservation; improving global biodiversity databases by making the submission of spatially explicit data mandatory for scientific publications; developing a global spatial database on threats to biodiversity to facilitate IUCN Red List assessments; automating preassessments by integrating distribution data and spatial threat data; building capacity in taxonomy, ecology, and biodiversity monitoring in countries with high species richness or endemism; creating species monitoring programs for lesser-known taxa; and developing sufficient funding mechanisms to reduce reliance on voluntary efforts. Implementing these strategies in the post-2020 biodiversity framework will help to overcome the lack of capacity and data regarding the conservation status of biodiversity. This will require a collaborative effort among scientists, policy makers, and conservation practitioners.     

Conservation and Adaptation to Climate Change

Abstract: The need to adapt to climate change has become increasingly apparent, and many believe the practice of biodiversity conservation will need to alter to face this challenge. Conservation organizations are eager to determine how they should adapt their practices to climate change. This involves asking the fundamental question of what adaptation to climate change means. Most studies on climate change and conservation, if they consider adaptation at all, assume it is equivalent to the ability of species to adapt naturally to climate change as stated in Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Adaptation, however, can refer to an array of activities that range from natural adaptation, at one end of the spectrum, to sustainability science in coupled human and natural systems at the other. Most conservation organizations deal with complex systems in which adaptation to climate change involves making decisions on priorities for biodiversity conservation in the face of dynamic risks and involving the public in these decisions. Discursive methods such as analytic deliberation are useful for integrating scientific knowledge with public perceptions and values, particularly when large uncertainties and risks are involved. The use of scenarios in conservation planning is a useful way to build shared understanding at the science–policy interface. Similarly, boundary organizations—organizations or institutions that bridge different scales or mediate the relationship between science and policy—could prove useful for managing the transdisciplinary nature of adaptation to climate change, providing communication and brokerage services and helping to build adaptive capacity. The fact that some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are active across the areas of science, policy, and practice makes them well placed to fulfill this role in integrated assessments of biodiversity conservation and adaptation to climate change.     

A roadmap for ladybird conservation and recovery

Ladybirds (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) provide services that are critical to food production, and they fulfill an ecological role as a food source for predators. The richness, abundance, and distribution of ladybirds, however, are compromised by many anthropogenic threats. Meanwhile, a lack of knowledge of the conservation status of most species and the factors driving their population dynamics hinders the development and implementation of conservation strategies for ladybirds. We conducted a review of the literature on the ecology, diversity, and conservation of ladybirds to identify their key ecological threats. Ladybird populations are most affected by climate factors, landscape composition, and biological invasions. We suggest mitigating actions for ladybird conservation and recovery. Short-term actions include citizen science programs and education, protective measures for habitat recovery and threatened species, prevention of the introduction of non-native species, and the maintenance and restoration of natural areas and landscape heterogeneity. Mid-term actions involve the analysis of data from monitoring programs and insect collections to disentangle the effect of different threats to ladybird populations, understand habitat use by taxa on which there is limited knowledge, and quantify temporal trends of abundance, diversity, and biomass along a management-intensity gradient. Long-term actions include the development of a worldwide monitoring program based on standardized sampling to fill data gaps, increase explanatory power, streamline analyses, and facilitate global collaborations.     

Utility of Mitochondrial DNA Barcodes in Species Conservation

Abstract:  Molecular tools are a standard part of many conservation studies and can be informative at many different levels of analysis, although there are inherent limitations and strengths of different genes or parts of genes to inform specific questions. Animal DNA barcodes, 600- to 800-base-pair segments of the mitochondrial gene cytochrome oxidase I, have been proposed as a means to quantify global biodiversity. Although mitochondrial (mt) DNA has a long history of use at the species level, recent analyses suggest that the use of a single gene, particularly mitochondrial, is unlikely to yield data that are balanced, universally acceptable, or sufficient in taxonomic scope to recognize many species lineages. Mitochondrial and nuclear genomes have different patterns of evolution and modes of inheritance, which can result in very different assessments of biodiversity. The ramifications of choosing a particular definition of species (species concept) need to be carefully considered because current efforts have designated DNA barcodes as the universal species concept without demonstrating its superiority over preexisting concepts. The results of such a barcoding paradigm may include a failure to recognize significant portions of biodiversity or nuclear/mitochondrial mixed lineages and could spuriously focus conservation resources on populations with relatively minor mtDNA divergence. DNA barcodes are most likely to provide potentially useful information for groups that are already well studied, and such taxa do not constitute the majority of biodiversity or those in most need of research attention. DNA barcode-length sequences are an important source of data but, when used alone or out of context, may offer only a fraction of the information needed to characterize species while taking resources from broader studies that could produce information essential to robust and informed conservation decisions.