Balancing alternative land uses in conservation prioritization

Abstract

Abstract. Pressure on ecosystems to provide various different and often conflicting services is immense and likely to increase. The impacts and success of conservation prioritization will be enhanced if the needs of competing land uses are recognized at the planning stage. We develop such methods and illustrate them with data about competing land uses in Great Britain, with the aim of developing a conservation priority ranking that balances between needs of biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, agricultural value, and urban development potential. While both carbon stocks and biodiversity are desirable features from the point of view of conservation, they compete with the needs of agriculture and urban development. In Britain the greatest conflicts exist between biodiversity and urban areas, while the largest carbon stocks occur mostly in Scotland in areas with low agricultural or urban pressure. In our application, we were able successfully to balance the spatial allocation of alternative land uses so that conflicts between them were much smaller than had they been developed separately. The proposed methods and software, Zonation, are applicable to structurally similar prioritization problems globally.

Spatial optimization of carbon-stocking projects across Africa integrating stocking potential with co-benefits and feasibility

“…Several studies have included existing C biomass as one of several factors that should be considered as a trade-off for identifying site conservation purposes or under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) scheme [27][28][29][30] ; however, there is a lack of concomitant information on how C stocking by forestation or forest restoration, that is, potential C biomass, could be traded off with such co-benefits. We assess where C-stocking projects should be placed to optimize positive synergies with other factors such as species conservation, ecosystem services and socioeconomic factors (Fig.…”

“…Here, all features were equally weighted 27 : groundwater NATURE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1038/ncomms3975 ARTICLE recharge and governance received a weighting of three, and land value weighted negative three. For species richness, each taxonomic group carried a weight of one so that the final weight carried by faunal biodiversity also summed to three.…”

“…For species richness, each taxonomic group carried a weight of one so that the final weight carried by faunal biodiversity also summed to three. Each species was weighted as a function of the number of species in their taxonomic class in the region considered here 27 , with each mammal species weighted at 1/979, reptile species at 1/142 and amphibian species at 1/671. Finally, since we focused on C-stocking potential, its weight was varied in separate runs (weights of 3, 6, 12, 24 and 48).…”

Spatial Conservation Prioritization in Data-Poor Areas of the World

“…Taking a different approach to spatial conservation, there exist methods for spatial priority ranking, which operate on the principle that generic relationships are defined for how conservation value should be aggregated across many features, space and time (e.g. Moilanen 2008;Moilanen et al 2005Moilanen et al , 2011a. These relationships can be converted into mathematical and algorithmic form without the specification of any hard targets for features.…”

“…The obvious side is expansion of reserve networks to include larger areas of high-quality habitats. The other side is impact avoidance: when designing land-use zoning, try to guide environmentally harmful activity to the ecologically lowest-priority parts of the landscape (Moilanen et al 2011a). …”