Land management by bird community analysis: comparison among mapping methods for the zonation of a mediterranean habitat

Abstract

Management algorithms of protected areas are widely used to identify potential networks of natural reserves that meet pre-established ecological requirements, such as a specific habitat percentage or a specific number of populations, while minimizing the related costs. Here we present a comparison of priority conservation maps of a protected area in central Italy, generated using different methods (i.e., Marxan, Marxan with Zones, Zonation, and directly overlapping the bird data with the vegetation type in the study area), based on an eight-year data set describing bird communities in the Circeo National Park. The generated maps can be used as a starting point when working with stakeholders involved in the management of this area. Our cartographic comparison illustrated that in the majority of the cases priority areas overlapped (the proportion of overlap was greater than 80% of the area size), affirming that the methods are equivalent. However, there were also divergent cases (the proportion of overlap was 0% of the area size), suggesting differential sensitivities of the four compared methods.

Fish taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity and their vulnerabilities in the largest river in southeastern China

“…Environmental, social‐economical, and cultural factors should be considered when applying these systematic conservation algorithms (Delavenne et al., 2012 ; Isotti & Monacelli, 2019 ; Ma et al., 2020 ). Functional distinctiveness, phylogenetic endemism, ecological services, vegetation, and cultural preferences could be weighted as conservation features (Ainsworth et al., 2018 ; Jiang et al., 2020 ; Kosman et al., 2019 ; Ma et al., 2021 ).…”

Conservation Prioritization in a Tiger Landscape: Is Umbrella Species Enough?

“…[56]. It has been used to identify restoration and conservation sites across the globe [41][42][43][44][45]. It uses simulated annealing as the optimization method to design reserves that meet the target (or a set of criteria) at the lowest cost [57].…”

“…Conservation of these features can be carried out through spatial prioritization by setting conservation targets. Based on the availability of data and objectives, past studies have set targets for features such as natural areas, species richness and diversity, geological and topographical features, vegetation types, and ecosystem services [41][42][43][44][45]. Data availability for species and their habitat is an important challenge to this approach, which can be overcome by earth observation data, which play important roles in computing taxonomic and environmental surrogates for conservation features in areas with no or insufficient field data [46][47][48][49][50].…”