Conservation planning is the process of locating, configuring, implementing and maintaining areas that are managed to promote the persistence of biodiversity and other natural values. Conservation planning is inherently spatial. The science behind it has solved important spatial problems and increasingly influenced practice. To be effective, however, conservation planning must deal better with two types of change. First, biodiversity is not static in time or space but generated and maintained by natural processes. Second, humans are altering the planet in diverse ways at ever faster rates.

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Conservation planning in a changing world

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, an area almost the size of Japan, has a new network of no-take areas that significantly improves the protection of biodiversity. The new marine park zoning implements, in a quantitative manner, many of the theoretical design principles discussed in the literature. For example, the new network of no-take areas has at least 20% protection per “bioregion,” minimum levels of protection for all known habitats and special or unique features, and minimum sizes for no-take areas of at least 10 or 20 km across at the smallest diameter. Overall, more than 33% of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is now in no-take areas (previously 4.5%). The steps taken leading to this outcome were to clarify to the interested public why the existing level of protection was inadequate; detail the conservation objectives of establishing new no-take areas; work with relevant and independent experts to define, and contribute to, the best scientific process to deliver on the objectives; describe the biodiversity (e.g., map bioregions); define operational principles needed to achieve the objectives; invite community input on all of the above; gather and layer the data gathered in round-table discussions; report the degree of achievement of principles for various options of no-take areas; and determine how to address negative impacts. Some of the key success factors in this case have global relevance and include focusing initial communication on the problem to be addressed; applying the precautionary principle; using independent experts; facilitating input to decision making; conducting extensive and participatory consultation; having an existing marine park that encompassed much of the ecosystem; having legislative power under federal law; developing high-level support; ensuring agency priority and ownership; and being able to address the issue of displaced fishers.

Establishing representative no-take areas in the Great Barrier Reef: large-scale implementation of theory on marine protected areas

Graph structures and habitat availability metrics are two recent and complementary approaches for analysing landscape connectivity. They have gained rapid popularity and provided significant conceptual improvements for decision making in conservation planning. We present a further methodological development of the habitat availability concept and metrics by partitioning them into three separate fractions that quantify the different ways in which individual landscape elements can contribute to overall habitat connectivity and availability in the landscape, including stepping stone effects. These fractions are derived from the same concept, are measured in the same units and can be directly compared and combined within a unifying framework. This avoids the problematic and, so far, usual combination of metrics coming from different backgrounds and the arbitrary weighting of connectivity considerations in a broader context of conservation alternatives. We analyse how the relative importance of each fraction varies with species traits. In addition, we show how the critical patches differ for each of the fractions by analysing various forest habitats in the province of Lleida (NE Spain). We discuss the conceptual and conservation implications of this approach, which can be adapted to different degrees of ecological and spatial detail within the graph while still maintaining a coherent framework for the identification of critical elements in the landscape network.

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A common currency for the different ways in which patches and links can contribute to habitat availability and connectivity in the landscape

▪ Abstract Species extinctions and the deterioration of other biodiversity features worldwide have led to the adoption of systematic conservation planning in many regions of the world. As a consequence, various software tools for conservation planning have been developed over the past twenty years. These tools implement algorithms designed to identify conservation area networks for the representation and persistence of biodiversity features. Budgetary, ethical, and other sociopolitical constraints dictate that the prioritized sites represent biodiversity with minimum impact on human interests. Planning tools are typically also used to satisfy these criteria. This chapter reviews both the concepts and technical choices that underlie the development of these tools. Conservation planning problems can be formulated as optimization problems, and we evaluate the suitability of different algorithms for their solution. Finally, we also review some key issues associated with the use of these tools, such as computa...

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.31.042606.085844

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

Marxan is the most widely used conservation planning software in the world and is designed for solving complex conservation planning problems in landscapes and seascapes. In this paper we describe a substantial extension of Marxan called Marxan with Zones, a decision support tool that provides land-use zoning options in geographical regions for biodiversity conservation. We describe new functions designed to enhance the original Marxan software and expand on its utility as a decision support tool. The major new element in the decision problem is allowing any parcel of land or sea to be allocated to a specific zone, not just reserved or unreserved. Each zone then has the option of its own actions, objectives and constraints, with the flexibility to define the contribution of each zone to achieve targets for pre-specified features (e.g. species or habitats). The objective is to minimize the total cost of implementing the zoning plan while ensuring a variety of conservation and land-use objectives are achieved. We outline the capabilities, limitations and additional data requirements of this new software and perform a comparison with the original version of Marxan. We feature a number of case studies to demonstrate the functionality of the software and highlight its flexibility to address a range of complex spatial planning problems. These studies demonstrate the design of multiple-use marine parks in both Western Australia and California, and the zoning of forest use in East Kalimantan.

http://dusk.geo.orst.edu/Pickup/marxan_w_zones.pdf

Short communication: Marxan with Zones: Software for optimal conservation based land- and sea-use zoning

The problem of designing spatially cohesive nature reserve systems that meet biodiversity objectives is formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem. The multiobjective function minimises a combination of boundary length, area and failed representation of the biological attributes we are trying to conserve. The task is to reserve a subset of sites that best meet this objective. We use data on the distribution of habitats in the Northern Territory, Australia, to show how simulated annealing and a greedy heuristic algorithm can be used to generate good solutions to such large reserve design problems, and to compare the effectiveness of these methods.

Mathematical methods for spatially cohesive reserve design

Effects of intraspecific density and plant size on garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) sinigrin concentration

High elevation plant populations, such as those found in sub-alpine meadows, are at the forefront of climate change and likely to experience novel interactions with migrating plants from lower elevations, including non-native species. Some of these non-native plants, particularly members of the Brassicaceae, produce secondary metabolites that have been shown to inhibit root fungi in other ecosystems. We conducted a growth experiment with plant leachates in order to evaluate the degree to which the dominant high elevation grass species, Festuca thurberi would be affected by future novel interactions with the non-native mustard, Thlaspi arvense, relative to a native mustard (Noccaea fendleri). We assessed growth, chlorophyll content, biomass, mortality, and percent colonization of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and dark septate endophytes (DSE) in different genotypes of F. thurberi exposed to leachates from native and non-native mustards as well as F. thurberi leachate and a deionized (DI) water control. New growth and mortality varied more by genotype than by treatment with leachate of F. thurberi, T. arvense, and N. fendleri. Treatment, genotype, and the treatment × genotype interaction all had significant effects on chlorophyll content, with N. fendleri treatments demonstrating higher relative greenness levels than control treatments. Percent of fine roots with dark septate endophytes was significantly affected by individual genotype and treatment × genotype interaction, but there were no effects of treatment, genotype, or their interaction on percent root colonization by arbuscules or vesicles. Overall, we show that performance of a dominant high-altitude grass species varies in its response to the presence of an expanding, non-native plant, which may become increasingly common due to climate change.

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Elizabeth A. Cousins

Papers

Mathematical methods for spatially cohesive reserve design

Effects of intraspecific density and plant size on garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) sinigrin concentration

Intraspecific Variation in Responses of a Montane Grass, Festuca thurberi, to Simulated Biological Invasion