Designing reserves for biodiversity
The incorporation of corridors has been recognized as a key element in linking not only regions within a reserve, but also multiple reserves spread throughout a large landscape. However, corridors are not the only strategy in planning for habitat configuration, and might be complemented by strategies that plan to aggregate species in consolidated areas. It also may be beneficial to focus less on spatial planning, and more on maintaining a large representative sample of species so as to maintain high levels of biodiversity. In their new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology, Mokany et al. compare the effectiveness of reserve design focusing on four strategies: 1) connectivity, 2) aggregation, 3) representativeness, and 4) a balance of these three.
The approach of this paper is unique in several ways. First, the authors incorporate key ecological processes such as dispersal into their models so that individual movement contributes to evaluating a design method along with spatial configuration. Second, they look at changes in biodiversity over time, which can inform how reserves might shift in their effectiveness under climate change. The research focuses on plant diversity in Tasmania, Australia, and includes over 2,000 species in the analysis.
Their results indicate that the best reserve design depends strongly on the conservation goals of the designers. If the goal is to retain regional gamma diversity over time, then it’s best to allocate new reserves based on the current representativeness of habitat. However, basing reserves solely on current representativeness can ignore spatial extent of species occurrence. While allocating new reserve space solely to the creation of corridors was not very effective, combining plans for connectivity along with aggregation created the best option for retaining a large extent of species occurrence over time. In addition, the authors found that the dispersal ability of the species under consideration can greatly change whether a specific design strategy is more effective. Ultimately, a balance between multiple strategies put into the context of regional goals is likely to best support biodiversity over time as habitats shift under changing climatic conditions.
Article was produced by Conservation Corridor.
