BackgroundMonitoring land change at multiple spatial scales is essential for identifying hotspots of change, and for developing and implementing policies for conserving biodiversity and habitats. In the high diversity country of Colombia, these types of analyses are difficult because there is no consistent wall-to-wall, multi-temporal dataset for land-use and land-cover change.Methodology/Principal FindingsTo address this problem, we mapped annual land-use and land-cover from 2001 to 2010 in Colombia using MODIS (250 m) products coupled with reference data from high spatial resolution imagery (QuickBird) in Google Earth. We used QuickBird imagery to visually interpret percent cover of eight land cover classes used for classifier training and accuracy assessment. Based on these maps we evaluated land cover change at four spatial scales country, biome, ecoregion, and municipality. Of the 1,117 municipalities, 820 had a net gain in woody vegetation (28,092 km2) while 264 had a net loss (11,129 km2), which resulted in a net gain of 16,963 km2 in woody vegetation at the national scale. Woody regrowth mainly occurred in areas previously classified as mixed woody/plantation rather than agriculture/herbaceous. The majority of this gain occurred in the Moist Forest biome, within the montane forest ecoregions, while the greatest loss of woody vegetation occurred in the Llanos and Apure-Villavicencio ecoregions.ConclusionsThe unexpected forest recovery trend, particularly in the Andes, provides an opportunity to expand current protected areas and to promote habitat connectivity. Furthermore, ecoregions with intense land conversion (e.g. Northern Andean Páramo) and ecoregions under-represented in the protected area network (e.g. Llanos, Apure-Villavicencio Dry forest, and Magdalena-Urabá Moist forest ecoregions) should be considered for new protected areas.

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Abstract. The conversion of natural areas to human-dominated land uses has been the major cause of global biodiversity decline and ecosystem degradation. Protected areas have been the most common strategy for reducing habitat and species loss. Effective conservation planning requires current information on land change dynamics, and the factors driving these changes. Therefore, our main goal was to assess the implications of land change on present and future protected areas. Specifically, we identified hotspots of reforestation and deforestation in Colombia between 2001 and 2010, and we determined the factors that explained land change within these hotspots. We identified four reforestation hotpots located mainly in the highlands of the Andes, and four deforestation hotpots that were located in the lowlands. Environmental and armed conflict variables explained most of the variation in the woody vegetation and agriculture/ pasture classes, respectively. Although protected areas cover 12% of the country, only 4% of the reforestation and deforestation hotspots included protected areas. In Colombia, as well as the rest of the world, the majority of protected lands occur in remote regions where there are little to no economic activities and threats. Although we recognize the importance of this conservation approach, particularly for long-term conservation of large areas, we believe that complementary approaches that incorporate current land change dynamics are essential for future protected area planning. These approaches would place higher value on establishing new protected areas in regions that are undergoing rapid land change or regions where agricultural activities have been abandoned and ecosystems are beginning to recovery. The first approach would have immediate conservation benefits, while the second approach could bring ecosystem benefits in the short to intermediate-term and biodiversity benefits in the medium to long-term. These complementary approaches can provide helpful information for protected area conservation planning in a world with rapid land change.

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Effective conservation of rare plant species requires a detailed understanding of their unique distributions and habitat requirements to identify conservation targets. Research suggests that local conservation efforts may be one of the best means for accomplishing this task. We conducted a geographical analysis of the local distributions of rare plants in Napa County, California, to identify spatial relationships with individual habitat types. We measured the potential contribution of individual habitats to rare plant conservation by integrating analyses on overall diversity, species per area, specificity-weighted richness, presence of hotspots, and the composition of the rare plant community in each habitat type. This combination of analyses allowed us to determine which habitats are most significant for rare plant conservation at a local scale. Our analyses indicated that several habitat types were consistently associated with rare plant species. In broad terms, grasslands, oak forests, coniferous forests, wetlands, serpentines, chaparral, and rock outcrops were most consistently highlighted. No single habitat stood out in every analysis however, and therefore we conclude that careful selection of an assemblage of habitats that best represents diverse, restricted and unique rare plant communities will be the most efficient approach to protecting rare plant habitat at local scales. Accordingly we present a means of identifying conservation targets and protecting global biodiversity through local efforts.

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