Biodiversity Management and Research in Multifunctional Landscapes

Abstract

Despite their negative environmental impacts, human-modified environments such as agricultural and urban landscapes can have a relevant role on biodiversity conservation as complements of protected areas. Such anthropized landscapes may have endangered, valuable, and nuisance species, although most of them do not fit in any of these categories. Therefore, in such environments we must deal with the same decision-making process concerning the same possible interventions proposed by Caughley (1994) to wildlife management, which are related to biological conservation, sustainable use, control/coexistence, and monitoring. Such decision-making process should be based on good science and good governance. On such context, the first step should be to implement multifunctional landscapes, which keep their primary mission of human use, but incorporate a second but fundamental mission of biological conservation. In this study we present a summary of the research carried out at the Biota Program of Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) in this field since the late 1990's and propose priorities for biodiversity research and governance in multifunctional landscapes for the near future.

Terrestrial vertebrate fauna in a multifunctional landscape in Gabaldon, Nueva Ecija, Philippines

“…Increasing biodiversity can be done by changing to low land-use intensity or by changing landscape structure by increasing habitat heterogeneity and connectivity (Maskell et al 2019). The successful management of multifunctional landscapes may require a combination of land-sharing and land-sparing measures, taking into consideration the maintenance of large, connected habitats to reduce the effect of habitat fragmentation (Pfeifer et al 2017;Grass et al 2019;Verdade et al 2022). Strict conservation areas and biodiversity corridors in multifunctional landscapes could allow species, especially those that can be adversely affected by edge effects or small habitat size, to move from one area to another.…”

“…In the Philippines and other developing Asian countries, consolidating economic growth, human development, and environmental sustainability remains a challenge (Bridgewater et al 2015;Martinico-Perez et al 2018;Horigue et al 2023), especially in underdeveloped areas where the community must rely on resource production (e.g., production of valuable crops) and extraction (e.g., logging, harvesting of firewood for charcoal-making) from biologically-diverse habitats for sustenance. Resource extraction and conversion of forest land into agricultural lands often collide with biodiversity conservation (Verdade et al 2022), with agricultural expansion into natural ecosystems being recognized as a threat to the unique biodiversity in many tropical landscapes (Grass et al 2019). The conversion of forests and adjacent habitat types into agricultural lands will not only threaten the forest and its biodiversity, but also threaten the lives of humans, especially those living close to forests, who are most dependent upon these habitats (Diansyah et al 2021).…”

“…This information will be valuable in determining species-habitat association, population levels, and the threats to species in the area. Research on biodiversity management on multifunctional agricultural landscapes should also help society perceive and solve problems cost-effectively (Verdade et al 2022).…”