Rare and declining bird species benefit most from designating protected areas for conservation in the UK

Abstract

There have been recent renewed commitments to increase the extent of protected areas to combat the growing biodiversity crisis but the underpinning evidence for their effectiveness is mixed and causal connections are rarely evaluated. We used data gathered by three large-scale citizen science programmes in the UK to provide the most comprehensive assessment to date of whether national (Sites of Special Scientific Interest) and European (Special Protection Areas/Special Areas of Conservation) designated areas are associated with improved state (occurrence, abundance), change (rates of colonization, persistence and trend in abundance), community structure and, uniquely, demography (productivity) on a national avifauna, while controlling for differences in land cover, elevation and climate. We found positive associations with state that suggest these areas are well targeted and that the greatest benefit accrued to the most conservation-dependent species since positive associations with change were largely restricted to rare and declining species and habitat specialists. We suggest that increased productivity provides a plausible demographic mechanism for positive effects of designation.

The effectiveness of UK protected areas in preventing local extinctions

“…While PAs are only weakly associated with reducing local extinction risk for birds as a taxonomic grouping, a finding supported by other recent studies (Barnes et al, 2023;Sanderson et al, 2023), individual bird species and species from other taxonomic groups could still benefit from even small, high-quality protected sites (Barnes et al, 2023). For example, greater PA coverage is associated with sites that contain a large population of adders Vipera berus in the United Kingdom (Gardner et al, 2019) and the majority of butterfly and Odonata species maintain higher abundance in PAs than outside across their historical UK ranges (Gillingham et al 2015).…”

Coupling Biodiversity and Human Pressures to Indicate Conservation Priorities for Threatened Waterfowl Species: A Case in the Henan Yellow River Wetland National Nature Reserve

“…Due to their sensibility to human-dominated environments that make detections relatively rare, important gaps remain in knowledge of the distribution and ecology of threatened waterfowl species. Recent studies are beginning to address this issue by using extensive species databases (such as national species databases and museum records) and long-term monitoring data [19,21]. However, a number of developing countries face a lack of previously mentioned databases due to the limitation of manpower and financial resource constraints.…”

“…Despite the ecological importance and management concern, research on threatened waterfowl is given little attention in PAs. Recently, a handful of studies have been conducted to identify priority areas for protecting threatened waterfowl, which improved PAs conservation effectiveness [17,19,21,22]. Empirical evidence from the UK and Korea indicated PAs effectiveness shortfalls by assessing the protected area coincidence with threatened waterfowl-rich areas [19,21].…”

“…Recently, a handful of studies have been conducted to identify priority areas for protecting threatened waterfowl, which improved PAs conservation effectiveness [17,19,21,22]. Empirical evidence from the UK and Korea indicated PAs effectiveness shortfalls by assessing the protected area coincidence with threatened waterfowl-rich areas [19,21]. However, due to species monitoring programs' deficiency, spatially explicit threatened waterfowl data are lacking in developing countries [23,24].…”