Determination of national conservation responsibilities for species conservation in regions with multiple political jurisdictions

Schmeller, Dirk S.; Gruber, Bernd; Bauch, Bianca; Lanno, Kaire; Budrys, Eduardas; Babij, Valerija; Juškaitis, Rimvydas; Sammul, Marek; Varga, Zoltán; Henle, Klaus

doi:10.1007/s10531-008-9439-8

Cited by 33 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…A possible solution is provided by the idea of assigning different conservation responsibilities to countries, which reflects the contribution of a country or area to the survival of a species (Schmeller et al 2008a;Schmeller et al 2008b). We demonstrate the effect of using Annex list species as the main designation criteria, by comparing the achieved representation to the representation if species were randomly allocated to sites.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mind the gap!” – How well does Natura 2000 cover species of European interest?

Gruber¹,

Evans²,

Henle³

et al. 2012

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Setting aside protected areas is widely recognized as one of the most effective measures to prevent species from extinction. Accordingly, there has been a tremendous effort by governments worldwide to establish protected areas, resulting in over 100,000 sites, which are set aside, to achieve the 10% target proposed at the Fourth World Park Congress in 1992 in Caracas. The main effort of the European Union to achieve this target is the Natura 2000 network of protected areas, comprising over 25,000 sites representing 18% of the area of the 27 Member States of the European Union. The designation of Natura 2000 sites was based on species and habitats listed in the Annexes of the Habitats and Birds Directive. The effectiveness of the selection process and the resulting Natura 2000 network has often been questioned as each country made its designations largely independently and in most cases without considering the theories of optimal REsEARCH ARtiClE Launched to accelerate biodiversity conservation A peer-reviewed open-access journalBernd Gruber et al. / Nature Conservation 3: 45-63 (2012) 46 reserve site selection. However, the effectiveness of the selection process and the Natura 2000 network has never been explicitly analysed at the European scale. Here we present such an analysis focusing on the representation of Annex II species of the Habitats Directive in the Natura 2000 network relative to a random allocation of species to sites. Our results show that the network is effective in covering target species and minimizing the number of gap species (i.e. species not represented in a single site of the Natura 2000 network). We demonstrate that the representation is uneven among species. Some species are overrepresented and many species are only represented in a low number of sites. We show that this is mainly due to differing patterns in species ranges, as wide-spread species are inevitably represented in many sites, but narrow ranged species are often covered only by a small number of sites in a particular area. Finally, we propose a representation index that detects species that are underrepresented and could be used to direct future conservation efforts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mind the gap!” – How well does Natura 2000 cover species of European interest?

Gruber¹,

Evans²,

Henle³

et al. 2012

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“…Natura 2000 sites should be under continuous observation and evaluation, to determine their importance for the conservation of biodiversity in a biogeographical region, either using site selection algorithms as implemented in the programs ZONATION (Moilanen et al 2005) or MARXAN (Watts et al 2009) or by determining the international importance of the sites for the global survival of a species (Schmeller et al 2008a, b). Such an approach would improve efficiency and create importance categories for each Natura 2000 site, as well as providing a basis on which to determine appropriate resource allocation.…”

Section: Recommendations and Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effectiveness of the Natura 2000 network to cover threatened species

Trochet¹,

Schmeller²

2013

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The world's biodiversity is currently in rapid decline -Europe being no exception -with as principal cause a human-mediated global change. The Natura 2000 network is an important conservation tool for European biodiversity; it is a network of natural and semi-natural sites within Europe with high heritage values due to the exceptional flora and fauna they contain. Here, we evaluated the coverage of 300 threatened species by the Natura 2000 network, and determined potential factors influencing the designation of sites and the structure of the network within a country (social, ecological and demographic national factors). Our analysis was based on a coverage ratio between the Natura 2000 sites and distribution maps of threatened European species. We showed that the distributions of a large proportion of threatened species of mammals, birds and reptiles considered in our study were highly covered (above 90%) by the current Natura 2000 network, demonstrating that the Natura 2000 network also covers species not listed in the annexes of the Nature Directives. However, our results confirm that a large proportion of threatened species (some of them listed on the European annexes), especially fishes, are currently poorly covered by the Natura 2000 network. The coverage of species likely seemed to be highly related to national demographic factors, i.e. the proportion of the national urban population. Our analysis also suggested that the designation of sites depends too strongly on governmental politics, economic and cultural criteria, and interactions between society and the environment. A more effective process might be necessary to ensure the Natura 2000 network reaches its potential as the most important and comprehensive network of protected areas intended to halt the loss of biodiversity in Europe in the near future.

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“…As resources remain scarce, states are forced to determine their national responsibilities and set conservation priorities. Here we propose a method to determine national responsibilities for European habitat types, following a methodology initially developed for species (Schmeller et al 2008b). The method was applied to 71 forest habitat types using three different reference areas and two different biogeographical maps.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

National responsibilities for conserving habitats – a freely scalable method

Schmeller¹,

Maier²,

Evans³

et al. 2012

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Conservation of habitats is a major approach in the implementation of biodiversity conservation strategies. Because of limited resources and competing interests not all habitats can be conserved to the same extent and a prioritization is needed. One criterion for prioritization is the responsibility countries have for the protection of a particular habitat type. National responsibility reflects the effects the loss of a particular habitat type within the focal region (usually a country) has on the global persistence of that habitat type. Whereas the concept has been used already successfully for species, it has not yet been developed for habitats. Here we present such a method that is derived from similar approaches for species. We further investigated the usability of different biogeographic and environmental maps in our determination of national responsibilities for habitats. For Europe, several different maps exist, including (1) the Indicative European Map of Biogeographic Regions, (2) Udvardy's biogeographic provinces, (3) WWF ecoregions, and (4) the environmental zones of Metzger et al. (2005). The latter is particularly promising, as the map of environmental zones has recently been extended to cover the whole world (Metzger et al. in press), allowing the application of our methodology at a global scale, making it highly comparable between countries and applicable across variable scales (e.g. regions, countries). Here, we determined the national responsibilities for 71 forest habitats. We further compared the national responsibility class distribution in regard to the use of different reference areas, geographical Europe, Western Palearctic and Palearctic. We found that the distributions of natural responsibility classes resembled each other largely for the different combinations of reference area and biogeographic map. The most common rank in all cases was the "medium" rank. Most notably, with increasing size of the reference area, a shift from alloca- ReseARCh ARtiCle Launched to accelerate biodiversity conservationA peer-reviewed open-access journal Dirk S. Schmeller et al. / Nature Conservation 3: 21-44 (2012) 22 tions to a basic rank to allocations to a medium rank (from 1:4 to 1:1) was observed. The least frequent rank was the "very high" category. The methodology to determine national responsibilities presented here is readily applicable to estimate conservation responsibilities for habitats of the EU25 countries. It should be based on the environmental zones map and should use Europe as the reference area. It then provides a tool to allocate funds, direct conservation actions in the most sensible way, and highlight conservation-relevant data gaps.

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Determination of national conservation responsibilities for species conservation in regions with multiple political jurisdictions

Cited by 33 publications

References 32 publications

“Mind the gap!” – How well does Natura 2000 cover species of European interest?

“Mind the gap!” – How well does Natura 2000 cover species of European interest?

Effectiveness of the Natura 2000 network to cover threatened species

National responsibilities for conserving habitats – a freely scalable method

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