Biodiversity Conservation Planning Tools: Present Status and Challenges for the Future

Sarkar, Sahotra; Pressey, Robert L.; Faith, Daniel P.; Margules, C. R.; Fuller, Trevon; Stoms, David M.; Moffett, Alexander S.; Wilson, Kerrie A.; Williams, Kristen; Williams, Paul H.; Andelman, Sandy J.

doi:10.1146/annurev.energy.31.042606.085844

Cited by 456 publications

(397 citation statements)

References 205 publications

(234 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

379

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…As highlighted in Egoh et al (2007Egoh et al ( , 2010 and demonstrated by Chan et al (2006), planning for ecosystem services can benefit from the two decades of research and development that has gone into the field of conservation planning, a subdiscipline of conservation biology which deals with identifying spatial priorities for conservation actions. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) has already been used extensively around the world to plan for biodiversity (Margules and Pressey, 2000;Sarkar et al, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying priority areas for ecosystem service management in South African grasslands

Egoh

Reyers

Rouget

et al. 2011

Journal of Environmental Management

163

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

a b s t r a c tGrasslands provide many ecosystem services required to support human well-being and are home to a diverse fauna and flora. Degradation of grasslands due to agriculture and other forms of land use threaten biodiversity and ecosystem services. Various efforts are underway around the world to stem these declines. The Grassland Programme in South Africa is one such initiative and is aimed at safeguarding both biodiversity and ecosystem services. As part of this developing programme, we identified spatial priority areas for ecosystem services, tested the effect of different target levels of ecosystem services used to identify priority areas, and evaluated whether biodiversity priority areas can be aligned with those for ecosystem services. We mapped five ecosystem services (below ground carbon storage, surface water supply, water flow regulation, soil accumulation and soil retention) and identified priority areas for individual ecosystem services and for all five services at the scale of quaternary catchments. Planning for individual ecosystem services showed that, depending on the ecosystem service of interest, between 4% and 13% of the grassland biome was required to conserve at least 40% of the soil and water services. Thirty-four percent of the biome was needed to conserve 40% of the carbon service in the grassland. Priority areas identified for five ecosystem services under three target levels (20%, 40%, 60% of the total amount) showed that between 17% and 56% of the grassland biome was needed to conserve these ecosystem services. There was moderate to high overlap between priority areas selected for ecosystem services and already-identified terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity priority areas. This level of overlap coupled with low irreplaceability values obtained when planning for individual ecosystem services makes it possible to combine biodiversity and ecosystem services in one plan using systematic conservation planning.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying priority areas for ecosystem service management in South African grasslands

Egoh

Reyers

Rouget

et al. 2011

Journal of Environmental Management

163

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…That review gave additional examples using metaheuristics and other optimization algorithms for forest management. Another rich review of the biodiversity conservation planning tools was (Sarkar et al 2006) and is highly recommended for further reading.…”

Section: Reconfiguration Of Existing Landscape For Nature Conservatiomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Agricultural systems are nowadays considered as one of the major sources of environmental pollution and deterioration of biodiversity features worldwide, including species extinction (Münier et al 2004;Sarkar et al 2006). However, agroecosystems have the potential to deliver many regulation ecosystem services such as pest regulation, water cleaning, or carbon sequestration.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metaheuristics for agricultural land use optimization. A review

Memmah

Lescourret

Yao

et al. 2015

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Agricultural landscapes presently cover about 46 % of earth terrestrial surface. This cultivated area is decreasing, whereas the global food demand is projected to increase up to 70 % in 2050. The intensification of agriculture is not a solution to this food issue because intensive agriculture has often resulted in pollution and loss of biodiversity. On the other hand, mechanistic models with optimization algorithms can be used to design alternative land uses for sustainable agriculture. Here, we present a review of metaheuristics for land use optimization reported in 50 articles including 38 case studies carried out in 16 countries. Our main conclusions are: 1) the success of metaheuristics is problem-dependent. In general, metaheuristics enable search to escape from local optima and find a good global approximation solution.2) The choice of a given metaheuristic for solving a given problem seems to be driven by its historical use in a research team and by its popularity outside the metaheuristics research community, rather than by the characteristics of the problems to be solved and by the latest results from the metaheuristics research community. 3) Stakeholders of land use are increasingly involved at different levels of the land use optimization procedure and multi-actors decision-making methods are necessary to find trade-offs between their competing interests. 4) A future challenge is the use of parallelization techniques along with the hybridization of different metaheuristics or of metaheuristics with other optimization methods.

show abstract

“…Although several researchers have developed tools for prioritization of areas under biodiversity criteria (Sarkar et al, 2006), application of these tools to real-world challenges has been rare (see Koleff et al, 2009 for an exception). More recently, however, prioritization thinking has been broadened considerably to include multi-factor, multi-temporal scenarios, which have the potential to cover much more of the true complexity of the challenge (Sarkar et al, 2006).…”

Section: Synthetic Conservation Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%