Strengthening protected areas for biodiversity and ecosystem services in China
Weihua Xu,Yi Xiao,Jingjing Zhang,Wu Yang,Lu Zhang,Vanessa Hull,Zhi Wang,Hua Zheng,Jianguo Liu,Stephen Polasky,Ling Jiang,Yang Xiao,Xuewei Shi,Enming Rao,Fei Lu,Xiaoke Wang,Gretchen C. Daily,Zhiyun Ouyang +17 more
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TLDR
It is found that China’s nature reserves serve moderately well for mammals and birds, but not for other major taxa, nor for these key regulating ecosystem services, and a new category of PAs globally is proposed, for sustaining the provision of ecosystems services and achieving sustainable development goals.Abstract:
Recent expansion of the scale of human activities poses severe threats to Earth's life-support systems. Increasingly, protected areas (PAs) are expected to serve dual goals: protect biodiversity and secure ecosystem services. We report a nationwide assessment for China, quantifying the provision of threatened species habitat and four key regulating services-water retention, soil retention, sandstorm prevention, and carbon sequestration-in nature reserves (the primary category of PAs in China). We find that China's nature reserves serve moderately well for mammals and birds, but not for other major taxa, nor for these key regulating ecosystem services. China's nature reserves encompass 15.1% of the country's land surface. They capture 17.9% and 16.4% of the entire habitat area for threatened mammals and birds, but only 13.1% for plants, 10.0% for amphibians, and 8.5% for reptiles. Nature reserves encompass only 10.2-12.5% of the source areas for the four key regulating services. They are concentrated in western China, whereas much threatened species' habitat and regulating service source areas occur in eastern provinces. Our analysis illuminates a strategy for greatly strengthening PAs, through creating the first comprehensive national park system of China. This would encompass both nature reserves, in which human activities are highly restricted, and a new category of PAs for ecosystem services, in which human activities not impacting key services are permitted. This could close the gap in a politically feasible way. We also propose a new category of PAs globally, for sustaining the provision of ecosystems services and achieving sustainable development goals.read more
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References
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BookDOI
Guidelines for applying protected area management categories
TL;DR: IUCN's Protected Areas Management Categories (PAMC) are recognized by international bodies such as the United Nations as well as many national governments as mentioned in this paper as the benchmark for defining, recording and classifying protected areas.
Journal ArticleDOI
Effectiveness of Parks in Protecting Tropical Biodiversity
TL;DR: The majority of parks are successful at stopping land clearing, and to a lesser degree effective at mitigating logging, hunting, fire, and grazing, suggesting that even modest increases in funding would directly increase the ability of parks to protect tropical biodiversity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Improvements in ecosystem services from investments in natural capital
Zhiyun Ouyang,Hua Zheng,Yi Xiao,Stephen Polasky,Jianguo Liu,Weihua Xu,Qiao Wang,Lu Zhang,Yang Xiao,Enming Rao,Ling Jiang,Fei Lu,Xiaoke Wang,Guangbin Yang,Shihan Gong,Bingfang Wu,Yuan Zeng,Wu Yang,Gretchen C. Daily +18 more
TL;DR: Overall, ecosystem services improved from 2000 to 2010, apart from habitat provision, and China’s national conservation policies contributed significantly to the increases in those ecosystem services.
Journal ArticleDOI
Global mapping of ecosystem services and conservation priorities
Robin Naidoo,Andrew Balmford,Robert Costanza,Brendan Fisher,Rhys E. Green,Bernhard Lehner,T.R. Malcolm,Taylor H. Ricketts +7 more
TL;DR: The preliminary results show that regions selected to maximize biodiversity provide no more ecosystem services than regions chosen randomly, and spatial concordance among different services, and between ecosystem services and established conservation priorities, varies widely.