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Species and space: a combined gap analysis to guide management planning of conservation areas

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Abstract

Context

With accelerating global declines in biodiversity, establishment and expansion of conservation areas (CAs) have increasingly been advocated in recent decades. Gap analysis has been useful to evaluate the sufficiency and performance of CAs.

Objectives

Researchers often identify putative gaps in the protection of biodiversity in CA networks, drawing on evidence from species occurrence patterns (i.e., representation), yet the effect on the gap analyses of the spatial configuration of CAs is poorly understood.

Methods

Focusing on two large, charismatic carnivores of western Asia, Persian leopard and Asiatic cheetah, we used species distribution models (SDMs) to map potentially suitable habitats throughout the region. We calculated species representation for four categories of CAs within the conservation network in Iran and used a new application of graph theory to include their spatial configuration into our gap analysis. We then regressed species representation against spatial configuration to provide more insights into the performance of different categories of CAs.

Results

Results showed that the existing CA network conserves only 32% of the suitable habitats for the two species. Leveraging spatial configuration of the conservation areas into the gap analysis, however, revealed that the recently-established less strictly CAs disproportionately provide a higher contribution to the collective effectiveness of the entire conservation network.

Conclusions

We introduce network bias as a new concept in reserve design and argue that incorporating spatial configuration into CA gap analysis improves the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of reserve network designs, and is an important decision support tool for integrated conservation planning.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the financial and technical support of the DoE of Iran, the Global Environmental Facilities (GEF), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). We thank K. Baradarani and A. Taktehrani for their help in collecting leopard occurrence data. Our special thanks go to the game guards of the DoE who helped us in field sampling. MA received a sabbatical research fund from the Ministry of Sciences, Research and Technology of Iran for a 6-month research in Swiss Federal Research Institute (WSL). MSF was supported by a research fellowship from Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Natural Resources, Isfahan University of Technology, 8415683111, Isfahan, Iran

    Mohsen Ahmadi & Mahmoud-Reza Hemami

  2. Dynamic Macroecology Group, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, 8903, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    Mohsen Ahmadi

  3. Oxford Martin School and Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, 34 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BD, UK

    Mohammad S. Farhadinia

  4. Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Tubney, Abingdon, OX13 5QL, UK

    Samuel A. Cushman & David W. Macdonald

  5. Rocky Mountain Research Station, United States Forest Service, Flagstaff, 86004 AZ, USA

    Samuel A. Cushman

  6. Department of Natural Environment and Biodiversity, College of Environment, 3174674761, Karaj, Iran

    Bagher Nezami Balouchi

  7. I.R. Iran Department of Environment, Conservation of Asiatic Cheetah Project (CACP), 738314155, Teheran, Iran

    Houman Jowkar

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  1. Mohsen Ahmadi
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  4. Mahmoud-Reza Hemami
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Correspondence to Mohsen Ahmadi.

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Ahmadi, M., Farhadinia, M.S., Cushman, S.A. et al. Species and space: a combined gap analysis to guide management planning of conservation areas. Landscape Ecol 35, 1505–1517 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01033-5

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