Abstract
A key issue in global conservation is how biodiversity co-benefits can be incorporated into land use and climate change mitigation activities, particularly those being negotiated under the United Nations to reduce emissions from tropical deforestation and forest degradation1,2. Protected areas have been the dominant strategy for tropical forest conservation and they have increased substantially in recent decades3. Avoiding deforestation by preserving carbon stored in vegetation between protected areas provides an opportunity to mitigate the effects of land use and climate change on biodiversity by maintaining habitat connectivity across landscapes. Here we use a high-resolution data set of vegetation carbon stock to map corridors traversing areas of highest biomass between protected areas in the tropics. The derived corridors contain 15% of the total unprotected aboveground carbon in the tropical region. A large number of corridors have carbon densities that approach or exceed those of the protected areas they connect, suggesting these are suitable areas for achieving both habitat connectivity and climate change mitigation benefits. To further illustrate how economic and biological information can be used for corridor prioritization on a regional scale, we conducted a multicriteria analysis of corridors in the Legal Amazon, identifying corridors with high carbon, high species richness and endemism, and low economic opportunity costs. We also assessed the vulnerability of corridors to future deforestation threat.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Houghton, R. et al. The role of science in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). Carbon Manag. 1, 253–259 (2010).
Stickler, C. M. et al. The potential ecological costs and cobenefits of REDD: A critical review and case study from the Amazon region. Glob. Change Biol. 15, 2803–2824 (2009).
Jenkins, C. N. & Joppa, L. Expansion of the global terrestrial protected area system. Biol. Conserv. 142, 2166–2174 (2009).
Hansen, M. C. et al. High-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change. Science 342, 850–853 (2013).
Hansen, M. C., Stehman, S. V & Potapov, P. V. Quantification of global gross forest cover loss. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107, 8650–8655 (2010).
Baccini, A. et al. Estimated carbon dioxide emissions from tropical deforestation improved by carbon-density maps. Nature Clim. Change 2, 182–185 (2012).
Laurance, W. F. et al. Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas. Nature 489, 290–294 (2012).
Hansen, A. & DeFries, R. Ecological mechanisms linking protected areas to surrounding lands. Ecol. Appl. 17, 974–988 (2007).
DeFries, R., Hansen, A., Newton, A. & Hansen, M. Increasing isolation of protected areas in tropical forests over the past twenty years. Ecol. Appl. 15, 19–26 (2005).
Nepstad, D. et al. The end of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Science 326, 1350–1351 (2009).
Balmford, A., Gaston, K. J., Blyth, S., James, A. & Kapos, V. Global variation in terrestrial conservation costs, conservation benefits, and unmet conservation needs. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 100, 1046–1050 (2003).
UNFCCC. Report of the Conf of the Parties on its 16th Session (2011). http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2010/cop16/eng/07a01.pdf
Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and C. for I. E. S. I. N. (CIESIN)/Columbia U. Last of the Wild Project, Version 2, 2005 (LWP-2): Global Human Footprint Dataset (Geographic) (2005). http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/wildareas-v2-human-footprint-geographic
Soares-Filho, B. S. et al. Modelling conservation in the Amazon basin. Nature 440, 520–523 (2006).
Saatchi, S. S. et al. Benchmark map of forest carbon stocks in tropical regions across three continents. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 9899–9904 (2011).
Hwang, C. L. & Yoon, K. Multiple Attribute Decision Making: Methods and Applications 259 (Springer, (1981).
Kerr, J. Species richness, endemism, and the choice of areas for conservation. Conserv. Biol. 11, 1094–1100 (1997).
Rosenthal, A., Stutzman, H. & Forsyth, A. Creating mosaic-based conservation corridors to respond to major threats in the Amazon headwaters. Ecol. Restor. 30, 296–299 (2012).
Bennett, A. Linkages in the Landscape: The Role of Corridors and Connectivity in Wildlife Conservation (IUCN, 1999)
Yanai, A. M., Fearnside, P. M., Graça, P. M. L. D. A. & Nogueira, E. M. Avoided deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia: Simulating the effect of the Juma sustainable development reserve. For. Ecol. Manage. 282, 78–91 (2012).
Persha, L., Agrawal, A. & Chhatre, A. Social and ecological synergy: Local rulemaking, forest livelihoods, and biodiversity conservation. Science 331, 1606–1608 (2011).
Chhatre, A. & Agrawal, A. Trade-offs and synergies between carbon storage and livelihood benefits from forest commons. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 17667–17670 (2009).
Soares-Filho, B. et al. Role of Brazilian Amazon protected areas in climate change mitigation. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107, 10821–10826 (2010).
Börner, J. et al. Direct conservation payments in the Brazilian Amazon: Scope and equity implications. Ecol. Econ. 69, 1272–1282 (2010).
Laurance, W. F. et al. The fate of Amazonian forest fragments: A 32-year investigation. Biol. Conserv. 144, 56–67 (2011).
Brodie, J., Post, E. & Laurance, W. F. Climate change and tropical biodiversity: A new focus. Trends Ecol. Evol. 27, 145–150 (2012).
IUCN and UNEP. The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) (2010). www.protectedplanet.net
Dale, M. R. T. & Fortin, M-J. From graphs to spatial graphs. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 41, 21–38 (2010).
Pinto, N. & Keitt, T. H. Beyond the least-cost path: Evaluating corridor redundancy using a graph-theoretic approach. Landsc. Ecol. 24, 253–266 (2009).
Kier, G. et al. A global assessment of endemism and species richness across island and mainland regions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 9322–9327 (2009).
IUCN. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2012.1 (2010). http://www.iucnredlist.org
Acknowledgements
We thank A. Baccini for sharing data on VCS, T. Cormier for assistance generating species richness layers, B-S. Filho for sharing EOC data and B. McRae for access to connectivity modelling code. This work was financially supported by the NASA Applied Sciences programme, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Packard Foundation and the Google.org Foundation.
Author information
Contributions
S.G. and P.J. designed the study. P.J. conducted the analysis. P.J., S.G. and N.L. wrote the paper.
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jantz, P., Goetz, S. & Laporte, N. Carbon stock corridors to mitigate climate change and promote biodiversity in the tropics. Nature Clim Change 4, 138–142 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2105
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2105
- Springer Nature Limited
This article is cited by
-
Machine learning-ready remote sensing data for Maya archaeology
Scientific Data (2023)
-
Protecting boreal caribou habitat can help conserve biodiversity and safeguard large quantities of soil carbon in Canada
Scientific Reports (2022)
-
Strategic Forest Reserves can protect biodiversity in the western United States and mitigate climate change
Communications Earth & Environment (2021)
-
Protecting irrecoverable carbon in Earth’s ecosystems
Nature Climate Change (2020)
-
The exceptional value of intact forest ecosystems
Nature Ecology & Evolution (2018)