Protect the last of the wild

Watson, James; Venter, Oscar; Lee, Jasmine; Jones, Kendall R.; Robinson, John G.; Possingham, Hugh P.; Allan, James R.

doi:10.1038/d41586-018-07183-6

Cited by 253 publications

(202 citation statements)

References 19 publications

(17 reference statements)

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“…wilderness) (Graham & Clanahan ; Watson et al. , ) remains highly contentious, which may affect the generation of clear recommendations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Debate about whether to protect the most threatened areas (e.g., Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006;Pressey & Bottrill 2008;Devillers et al 2015) or the last of the remaining large, intact land and seascapes (i.e. wilderness) (Graham & Clanahan 2013;Watson et al 2016bWatson et al , 2018 remains highly contentious, which may affect the generation of clear recommendations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is becoming clear to many that a combination of both conserving threatened areas and preserving vulnerable intact habitats is crucial to preserving the full range of biodiversity (i.e., representation) in perpetuity Jones et al 2018a;Watson et al 2018). Furthermore, reactive and proactive conservation approaches are likely to attract different funding opportunities, unlocking conservation investment that would have otherwise been unavailable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantifying biases in marine‐protected‐area placement relative to abatable threats

Kuempel

Jones

Watson

et al. 2019

Conservation Biology

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Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a critical defense against biodiversity loss in the world's oceans, but to realize near‐term conservation benefits, they must be established where major threats to biodiversity occur and can be mitigated. We quantified the degree to which MPA establishment has targeted stoppable threats (i.e., threats that can be abated through effectively managed MPAs alone) by combining spatially explicit marine biodiversity threat data in 2008 and 2013 and information on the location and potential of MPAs to halt threats. We calculated an impact metric to determine whether countries are protecting proportionally more high‐ or low‐threat ecoregions and compared observed values with random protected‐area allocation. We found that protection covered <2% of ecoregions in national waters with high levels of abatable threat in 2013, which is ∼59% less protection in high‐threat areas than if MPAs had been placed randomly. Relatively low‐threat ecoregions had 6.3 times more strict protection (International Union for Conservation of Nature categories I–II) than high‐threat ecoregions. Thirty‐one ecoregions had high levels of stoppable threat but very low protection, which presents opportunities for MPAs to yield more significant near‐term conservation benefits. The extent of the global MPA estate has increased, but the establishment of MPAs where they can reduce threats that are driving biodiversity loss is now urgently needed.

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“…wilderness) (Graham & Clanahan ; Watson et al. , ) remains highly contentious, which may affect the generation of clear recommendations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantifying biases in marine‐protected‐area placement relative to abatable threats

Kuempel

Jones

Watson

et al. 2019

Conservation Biology

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“…Human water use is sustainable for some regions at some times, but for large portions of the globe, groundwater pumping exceeds recharge, river discharge is overallocated, and water pollution (grey water use) causes rampant human disease and ecosystem degradation (Dupas, Minaudo, & Abbott, ; Falkenmark et al, ; Landrigan et al, ). Second, humans have directly modified 77% of the Earth's land surface, excluding Antarctica, through activities such as agriculture, deforestation, and wetland destruction (Watson et al, ). Land use alters evapotranspiration, groundwater recharge, and run‐off within and beyond catchments in surprising ways.…”

Section: The Invisible Global Water Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

A water cycle for the Anthropocene

Abbott

Bishop

Zarnetske

et al. 2019

Hydrological Processes

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“…In the second, we considered how threats might change over time. One proposed benefit of a wilderness strategy is that it can secure large, low‐threat areas that might become highly threatened in the future (Watson et al., ). Thus, we allowed biodiversity loss in the wilderness patch (

q_{W}

) to increase over a period of 100 years until it was equal to that of the frontier patch.…”

Section: General Conservation Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

The context dependence of frontier versus wilderness conservation priorities

Sacre

Bode

Pressey

2019

CONSERVATION LETTERS

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Much of conservation planning has focused on how we should prioritize areas for protection based on biodiversity and cost, but less is known about how we should prioritize areas based upon the level of threat they face. We discuss two opposing threat prioritization strategies: frontier conservation (prioritizing high‐threat areas) and wilderness conservation (prioritizing low‐threat areas). Using a temporally explicit model, we demonstrate that the best strategy depends on a variety of factors, including protection costs, heterogeneity in biodiversity, biodiversity–area relationships, the rate of biodiversity recovery, the rate of change in threats through time, and the timeframe within which we measure conservation outcomes. By quantitatively comparing the impact of these strategies, we aim to shift the debate away from a simple dichotomy of frontier versus wilderness, toward an understanding of the context‐specific benefits of each option, and a discussion of how threat combines with other factors to determine spatial conservation priorities.

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Protect the last of the wild

Cited by 253 publications

References 19 publications

Quantifying biases in marine‐protected‐area placement relative to abatable threats

Quantifying biases in marine‐protected‐area placement relative to abatable threats

A water cycle for the Anthropocene

The context dependence of frontier versus wilderness conservation priorities

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