Effect of legal protection and management of protected areas at preventing land development: a Spanish case study

Abstract

Protected areas are entrusted long-term biodiversity conservation, but measures of their effectiveness are limited, methodologically diverse and, sometimes, of improvable accuracy. Using a semi-experimental BACI research design, this study assesses the environmental effectiveness of two highly related multiple-use protected area (PA) categories of European relevance at preventing land development: Sites of Community Importance (SCIs) and Special Areas of Conservation (SACs). The nonoverlapping SCI and SAC polygon networks of a northern Spanish region (Navarra) were used as the best possible case studies in the country because their main difference is implementation of active management (in the case of SACs). One kilometre outer buffer areas were created to serve as controls for each of the two PA networks. Three spatial-statistical models that progessively consider exclusion areas according to additional land protection legislation and biophysical covariates were tested to maximise their accurateness. Percentual increases of land development were compared for each of the four groups: SCIs, SCI-Buffers, SACs and SAC-Buffers, using Corine Land Cover (CLC) data from 2006 and 2012. Results show that SACs have been fully effective at preventing land development in the Navarra region whereas some exceptional development occurred in SCIs, even though their biophysical characteristics made them less prone to development than their buffer areas. Additional legislation seems to slightly add to protection inside PAs and provides clear protection to surrounding buffer areas. Residential uses were minor among the new artificial uses around Navarra's PAs.

Effect of protected areas in reducing land development across geographic and climate conditions of a rapidly developing country, Spain

“…Biophysical similarity between cases and controls assessed by S was high but lower than in other previous assessments (Rodríguez‐Rodríguez & Martínez‐Vega, ), suggesting that improvements to validity and uncertainty of results could be attained. The lowest similarity between cases and controls was obtained for NRs, many of them wetland ecosystems in Spain, which poses increased difficulty at finding similar surrounding controls.…”

“…Official census data boundaries of all PAs belonging to the four categories ( N = 2,369) were downloaded from the Spanish Ministry of Environment's website (Spanish Government, ) and unioned in a single protected polygon (PP) layer, in order to determine legal overlaps among the four PA categories and the initial designation date of each area (PP) exactly. PPs have been used in a number of recent assessments on PA effectiveness for being a more discriminating and valid approach than traditional approaches that assessed PAs' official boundaries regardless of total or partial legal overlaps (Rodríguez‐Rodríguez, Rodríguez, Blanco, & Abdul Malak, ; Rodríguez‐Rodríguez & Martínez‐Vega, , ). In the case of legal overlap, the oldest designation category was assigned to each PP, for being the initial date of the site's protection.…”

“…LULC change has been largely studied in Spain, across its whole territory (Jiménez, 2012;Stellmes et al, 2013), inside and around PAs (Hewitt, Pera, & Escobar, 2016;Martínez-Fernández, Ruiz-Benito, & Zavala, 2015; Rodríguez-Rodríguez & Martínez-Vega, 2018a), across biogeographic regions (Martínez-Fernández et al, 2015), and on specific environments such as the coast (Jiménez, 2007(Jiménez, , 2012Jiménez, Prieto, Riechmann, & Gómez, 2005). Recent studies have delved into the influence of PA management, territorial regulations, and biophysical characteristics on LULC changes in and around Spanish PAs using semi-experimental designs (Martínez-Fernández et al, 2015;Rodríguez-Rodríguez & Martínez-Vega, 2017, 2018a, 2018b in order to help to fill the gap in PA effectiveness studies based on evidence (Juffe-Bignoli et al, 2014). In their comprehensive studies, Martínez-Fernández et al (2015) and Rodríguez-Rodríguez and Martínez-Vega (2018a) shed light on a number of unresolved issues to understand the influence of PAs of different legal, managerial, and environmental contexts on land development.…”

Effects of Legal Designation and Management of a Multiple-Use Protected Area on Local Sustainability

“…There are, however, some hints that local SAC sustainability is likely greater, as suggested from previous studies elsewhere in Spain [36], even though time series for the SAC period were limited and the lack of covariate analyses reduces certainty on causality [9]. To begin with, most sustainability indicators improved more in cases than in controls in this period.…”

The Formation of Land Conservation Principles as the Framework for the Implementation of the Concept of Sustainable Development of Society

“…This problem is of particular concern to the state (Borská, 2015). One of the priorities of modern national policy is to conduct a comparative legal study of the compliance of legislation with European and world legal standards, as well as a comprehensive comparative legal analysis of the regulation of relations in protecting human health and life, the environment, including land, flora, and fauna (Rodríguez-Rodríguez & Martínez-Vega, 2018).…”