Conservation beyond boundaries: using animal movement networks in protected area assessment

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) are a core component of conservation policy and practice. However, many species for which they are designated are highly mobile, and may move among sites within and beyond PA boundaries. Environmental impacts on sites beyond those boundaries could thus impact the PA's protected populations, with the risk of adversely affecting its conservation objectives. Conservationists therefore urgently need tools to assess impacts on PAs and their populations of developments beyond their boundaries. We present a framework for using network analysis of observations of marked individuals to assess the protection footprint of PAs in the wider landscape and the impact footprint of developments within or neighboring PAs. We illustrate the use of this framework by assessing the impact of a current airport development proposal on a partially protected wetland, the Tagus estuary in Portugal, specifically by evaluating the extent of noise disturbance on the PA's population of Black‐tailed Godwits, a protected migratory wader species. By analyzing individual movements between sites and across seasons, we find disturbance impacts on up to 68.3% of individual Black‐tailed Godwits overall, greatly exceeding the estimates of 0.46–5.5% in the airport's Environmental Impact Assessments which derived from count data. We then compared the pre‐development network with simulated networks that represented two levels of site avoidance by removing sites predicted to receive noise in excess of two thresholds, 55 or 65 dB(A). Avoidance by Godwits of the potentially‐impacted sites is predicted to have a larger effect on network structure than removing the same number of sites at random, suggesting that an airport in the proposed location would operate as a barrier to connectivity in this wetland. We also highlight the role that network analyses of locations of marked individuals can play in assessing environmental impacts on protected sites and populations.

Global review of shorebird tracking publications: Gaps and priorities for research and conservation

“…This list of Priority Species may be regarded as conservative because we did not consider a need to expand protection of sites and habitats as indicating a need for tracking. However, while it may be possible to identify sites based on existing data (e.g., from counts), the effectiveness of protection depends on including a comprehensive range of sites and habitats used throughout the annual cycle (Choi et al 2019) and considering movements between them (Nightingale et al 2023;Beal et al in prep. ), so it is likely that tracking data could be a useful complement to existing information in many more cases -as long as its collection does not delay or divert resources from implementing necessary management actions (Buxton et al 2020).…”

“…Many shorebirds are migratory, with some species performing among the most impressive migrations of the animal kingdom (Battley et al 2012;Alves et al 2016;Conklin et al 2017). However, despite covering vast distances during their migrations, they often depend on a restricted set of feeding and resting sites (Dias et al 2006;Alves et al 2012) to which they tend to be highly faithful throughout their lives (Gill et al 2019) and local changes can therefore have wide-ranging repercussions (Burton et al 2006;Nightingale et al 2023). Over 50% of wetlands globally have already been destroyed (Davidson 2014) or considerably changed (Finlayson et al 2019;Santos et al 2022), and continued sea-level rise is expected to inundate coastal habitats worldwide (Nicholls & Cazenave 2010;He & Silliman 2019;Newton et al 2020).…”