Winter in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Wyoming (United States), which provides an example of how conservation actions that encompass lands surrounding already protected areas may aid in connectivity.
Protecting habitats for wildlife is one of the key strategies to preserve biodiversity. However, protecting patches alone will not be enough, and conservation plans should also consider the connectedness of habitats to maintain ecosystem functioning and diversity.
The question then arises, how do we select the habitats used for connectivity? The lands immediately surrounding already protected areas are called “greater ecosystems,” and could be key for future management efforts. A new paper looks at the importance of these lands for conservation and aims to define a set of criteria by which to prioritize them.
To define greater ecosystems, the authors focused on landscape permeability, or the ability of processes to move across boundaries of preserved lands and surrounding habitats. These processes include things like seed dispersal and animal movement, disturbances, and abiotic processes. Forces that reduce permeability of landscapes are distance from the preserved area, roads, land use, human population density, and other disturbances.
Their models prioritizing areas based on permeability can be used as a starting point to identify lands for conservation. This includes lands to add to existing preserves, or places to minimize human disturbance like introduction of invasive species, building of roads, or land use change.
Greater ecosystems based on bins of permeability away from protected areas. From Belote & Wilson 2020 Conservation Practice and Science.
To test the accuracy of their models, they compared their findings to lands already included in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a prime example of the preservation of greater ecosystems surrounding an existing national park. The original purpose of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem was to help connect isolated grizzly bear populations in Yellowstone National Park, and has since expanded to include large animal migratory routes. When defining the greater ecosystem, managers considered watersheds, species migration patterns, and species land use to create a buffer around the park. When the authors compared their findings with decisions made by land managers on the ground, there were strong similarities, indicating that their models would be informative for future projects.
In addition to considering which lands are most permeable, land ownership must also be taken into account. Greater ecosystems are made up of both public and private lands, creating unique challenges. Another key finding was that the most highly connected lands surrounding protected areas are owned by federal or state governments (67.9%), and adding these lands to protected status could double the amount of protected habitat we have today.
Resources:
Belote, R.T. and Wilson, M.B. 2020. Delineating greater ecosystems around protected areas to guide conservation. Conservation Practice and Science, e196. DOI: 10.1111/csp2.196
