Conservation Biology: The Importance of Wilderness

Lovejoy, Thomas Ε.

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.10.038

Cited by 15 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 8 publications

(9 reference statements)

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“…World Heritage protection of wilderness areas will also generate cobenefits that extend beyond natural heritage conservation. For example, averting the destruction of carbon rich ecosystems such as the last intact forests could prevent the release of substantial CO 2 emissions and play a key role in the fight against climate change (Lovejoy ). Moreover, it is well accepted that proactively conserving intact ecosystems is the most important adaptation for biodiversity and humankind (Watson et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaps and opportunities for the World Heritage Convention to contribute to global wilderness conservation

Allan

Kormos²,

Jaeger

et al. 2017

Conservation Biology

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Wilderness areas are ecologically intact landscapes predominantly free of human uses, especially industrial-scale activities that result in substantial biophysical disturbance. This definition does not exclude land and resource use by local communities who depend on such areas for subsistence and bio-cultural connections. Wilderness areas are important for biodiversity conservation and sustain key ecological processes and ecosystem services that underpin planetary life-support systems. Despite these widely recognized benefits and values of wilderness, they are insufficiently protected and are consequently being rapidly eroded. There are increasing calls for multilateral environmental agreements to make a greater and more systematic contribution to wilderness conservation before it is too late. We created a global map of remaining terrestrial wilderness following the established last-of-the-wild method, which identifies the 10% of areas with the lowest human pressure within each of Earth's 62 biogeographic realms and identifies the 10 largest contiguous areas and all contiguous areas >10,000 km . We used our map to assess wilderness coverage by the World Heritage Convention and to identify gaps in coverage. We then identified large nationally designated protected areas with good wilderness coverage within these gaps. One-quarter of natural and mixed (i.e., sites of both natural and cultural value) World Heritage Sites (WHS) contained wilderness (total of 545,307 km ), which is approximately 1.8% of the world's wilderness extent. Many WHS had excellent wilderness coverage, for example, the Okavango Delta in Botswana (11,914 km ) and the Central Suriname Nature Reserve (16,029 km ). However, 22 (35%) of the world's terrestrial biorealms had no wilderness representation within WHS. We identified 840 protected areas of >500 km that were predominantly wilderness (>50% of their area) and represented 18 of the 22 missing biorealms. These areas offer a starting point for assessing the potential for the designation of new WHSs that could help increase wilderness representation on the World Heritage list. We urge the World Heritage Convention to ensure that the ecological integrity and outstanding universal value of existing WHS with wilderness values are preserved.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaps and opportunities for the World Heritage Convention to contribute to global wilderness conservation

Allan

Kormos²,

Jaeger

et al. 2017

Conservation Biology

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“…Our maps of wilderness areas have already been used to highlight catastrophic declines in wilderness extent over the last two decades, and show that conservation efforts has been greatly outpaced by these losses ). This has raised the profile of wilderness conservation globally (Belote et al 2017, Lovejoy 2017, and it seems that international targets for wilderness conservation may be developed shortly (Kormos et al 2016, Lovejoy 2017. We anticipate that our maps will be important tools in the process of developing such targets, and for the conservation planning and decision making necessary to ensure representative protection of wilderness areas globally (Mittermeier et al 2003, Allan et al 2017b.…”

Section: Background and Summarymentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Information on the condition, threat and protection status of wilderness areas globally is limited because they are not monitored in any regular fashion (Lovejoy 2017), and the best available maps of global wilderness extent date back to the early 2000's (Hannah et al 1994, Sanderson et al 2002, Mittermeier et al 2003. Although these maps proved useful for numerous ecological and conservation analyses (Di Marco and Santini 2015, Inostroza et al 2016, Kormos et al 2016, Payne and Bro-Jørgensen 2016, they now provide a temporally static and much outdated view of wilderness extent , Laurance et al 2012, Laurance et al 2014.…”

Section: The State Of Wilderness Conservationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Natural ecological and evolutionary processes continue largely unimpeded in wilderness areas, providing a suite of high-value ecosystem services (Watson et al 2009, Martin and. These include regulation of hydrological cycles at multiple scales (Salati et al 1979, Furniss et al 2010, and significant organic carbon stocks (Mackey et al 2013, Lovejoy 2017. Wilderness areas are also critically important for in situ biodiversity conservation, supporting the last intact mega-faunal assemblages (Mittermeier et al 2003, Ripple et al 2015, wide ranging and migratory species (Klein et al 2009, Bauer andHoye 2014), and species sensitive to exploitation by or conflicts with humans (Ripple et al 2014).…”

Section: Background and Summarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There have also been deliberations about whether the term wilderness is still relevant given humanity's ubiquitous fingerprint (Cronon 1996). However, regardless of how wilderness is defined, it is clear that large intact ecosystems hold an exceptional range of environmental and cultural values that are being lost in more human modified, fragmented, and ecologically degraded landscapes (Freudenberger et al 2012, Lovejoy 2017. I now describe these values, and their important contribution to human well-being and the health of the planet, demonstrating that protecting wilderness is critical for averting the biodiversity crisis, addressing anthropogenic climate change, ensuring ecosystem service provisioning, and maintaining the world's human cultural diversity.…”

Section: Chapter 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Wilderness conservation in the Anthropocene

Allan¹

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Humanity is exerting unprecedented pressure on the natural environment, threatening tens of thousands of species with extinction, and degrading the condition of ecosystems worldwide. The extraordinary value of the last ecologically intact landscapes, free from industrial level degradation (which I call wilderness), is becoming increasingly recognised (chapter 1). Wilderness areas support many of the evolutionary and ecological processes that underpin all life on Earth, are critical for biodiversity conservation, and support the cultural integrity of many indigenous communities. The overarching aim of this thesis is to address key questions relevant to conserving wilderness areas and their values, with a focus on biodiversity conservation.Despite the exceptional value of wilderness areas, information on their location, condition, and threat status globally has been limited. In chapter 2, I utilise a high-resolution (1km 2 ) global dataset of human pressure on the terrestrial environment for the years 1993-2009 (appendix 1) to develop the first temporally inter-comparable global maps of terrestrial wilderness areas. I define wilderness as places free from human pressures such as land clearing, dense human settlements, agriculture, and infrastructure developments, which significantly damage the environment. A spatial analysis of changes in wilderness extent between 1993 and 2009 showed catastrophic declines amounting to 3.3 million km 2 , with the greatest losses occurring in the Amazon and Central Africa (appendix 2). Only 30 million km 2 of wilderness remains (23% of terrestrial areas).Considering rates and extent of wilderness loss varies throughout the world, it is important to identify where this loss is impacting species. In chapter 3, I present a global analysis of cumulative human impacts on threatened species. I develop a novel spatial framework that jointly considers the co-occurrence of threats and the distribution of 5,457 vertebrates. I discover that human impacts extend across 84% of Earth's terrestrial surface, and identify 'hotspots' of impacted species richness. One quarter (n=1237) of species are impacted by threats across >90% of their distribution, and 395 species are impacted across their entire range. The methodology represents a conceptual advance for analysing threats to biodiversity, moving beyond analysing human pressures, which are agnostic to species type and their individual sensitivities to threats, to analysing realised impacts on individual species.

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