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Conservation Biology Research
Landscape Ecology and Conservation Landscape Design
What arrangement of reserves optimally represents the biodiveristy of a landscape at minimum cost? How big a reserve is big enough to sustain biodiversity over the long term? Where are corridors optimally placed to reconnect fragmented populations? How easily do species cross gaps between habitat fragments? How do we plan and implement conservation landscapes in poor developing countries with high biodiversity values?
Many species are threatened by increasing habitat fragmentation, and addressing these questions helps us understand how species will interact with the changing habitat mosaics in their landscapes. This research also helps WWF design landscape-scale conservation strategies within priority areas (landscapes, seascapes and aquascapes) identified by biodiversity visions for priority ecoregions.
Sample WWF projects:
- Designing conservation landscapes for giant pandas
- Designing a conservation landscape for tigers
- Resistance of non-habitat "matrix" to movement between fragments
- How to design better conservation projects at the landscape scale
- Obtaining critical data for the design of conservation landscapes in the Southwestern Amazon
Designing conservation landscapes for giant pandas
Abstract: The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), now restricted to approximately 24 montane forest areas in southwest China, is one of the world's most imperiled mammals. The Qinling Mountains in Shaanxi Province are refuge to approximately 220 pandas and are the focus of our study. Pandas in the Qinling Mountains are elevational migrants, needing both low- and high-elevation montane forests to survive. The current network of nature reserves provides protection for less than 50 percent of their remaining habitat and fails to conserve essential habitat for dispersal. Using a combination of satellite classification, fieldwork, and geographic information system analyses, we identified a landscape--termed a giant panda conservation unit--that would meet the long-term, elevational requirements for giant pandas in the Qinling Mountains. Our results indicate that although the central portion of the panda's range is well protected, additional protection and several areas providing linkage to adjacent habitat blocks are needed to provide adequate habitat for long-term survival. Our results could be applied to a wide range of species, such as habitat or dietary specialists, elevational migrants, species at the edge of their historic range, and area-sensitive species that require winter refugia.
Loucks, C.J., Z. Lü, E. Dinerstein, D. Wang, D. Fu, and H. Wang. 2003. The giant pandas of the Qinling Mountains, China: a case study in designing conservation landscapes for elevational migrants. Conservation Biology 17:558-565. (PDF, 6.79M)
Designing a Conservation Landscape for Tigers
Abstract: Wildlife populations in small, isolated reserves face genetic and demographic threats to their survival. To increase the probability of long-term persistence, biologists promote metapopulation management, in which breeding subpopulations are protected as source pools. Animals that disperse from the source pools increase the probability of persistence of the metapopulation across the greater landscape. We used a geographic information system (GIS)-based, cost-distance model to design a conservation landscape along the Himalayan foothills for managing a metapopulation of Asia's largest predator, the tiger (Panthera tigris). The model is based on data from 30 years of field research on tigers, recent satellite imagery, and a decade of buffer-zone restoration in this region. We used the model to (1) identify potential dispersal corridors for tigers; (2) identify strategic transit refuges; and (3) make recommendations for off-reserve land management and restoration to enhance the potential of corridors for tigers. This tool can aid the design of conservation landscapes for other endangered, wide-ranging species in human-dominated environments.
Eric Wikramanayake, Meghan McKnight, Eric Dinerstein, Anup Joshi, Bhim Gurung, David Smith. 2004. Designing a conservation landscape for tigers in human-dominated environments. Conservation Biology 18( 3): 839-844.
Resistance of non-habitat "matrix" to movement between fragments
Abstract: Traditional approaches to the study of fragmented landscapes invoke an island-ocean model and assume that the non-habitat matrix surrounding remnant patches is uniform. Patch isolation, a crucial parameter to the predictions of island biogeography and metapopulation theories, is measured by distance alone. To test whether the type of inter-patch matrix can contribute significantly to patch isolation, I conducted a mark-recapture study on a butterfly community inhabiting meadows in a naturally patchy landscape. I used maximum likelihood to estimate the relative resistances of the two major matrix types (willow thicket and conifer forest) to butterfly movement between meadow patches. For four of the six butterfly taxa (subfamilies or tribes) studied, conifer was 3-12 times more resistant than willow. For the two remaining taxa (the most vagile and least vagile in the community), resistance estimates for willow and conifer were not significantly different, indicating that responses to matrix differ even among closely related species. These results suggest that the surrounding matrix can significantly influence the "effective isolation" of habitat patches, rendering them more or less isolated than simple distance or classic models would indicate. Modification of the matrix may provide opportunities for reducing patch isolation and thus the extinction risk of populations in fragmented landscapes.
Ricketts, T.H. 2001. The matrix matters: effective isolation in fragmented landscapes. The American Naturalist 158(1): 87-99.
How to design better conservation projects at the landscape scale
Abstract: The methods developed for landscape planning have a practical use in the design of conservation projects in the developing world. For example, in the Uluguru Mountains of Tanzania (part of the globally exceptional Eastern Arc Mountain Forests), landscape design ideas have been incorporated within the development and implementation of two Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) funded by DANIDA and the GEF. Similar design work is going on elsewhere to link conservation science with practical implementation in the field. In this book chapter we review some of these efforts, with particular attention to eastern Africa.
Burgess, N.D., T. Lehmberg, C. Loucks, J.A. D'Amico, and J. Morrison (2002). Some aspects of designing conservation landscapes: With an example from eastern Africa. Pp. 133-157 in Peter Schultz and Dolf Noppen, editors. Integrating conservation and development with a landscape approach. Environment and Development Network, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Obtaining critical data for the design of conservation landscapes in the Southwestern Amazon
Scientists have not yet determined how large a block of Amazonian forest habitat must be to support populations of all native species. This project is studying the home range requirements of several species that we believe are most sensitive to restrictions in habitat availability to better estimate adequate reserve size and configuration in the Amazon. By studying wide-ranging species -- such as jaguars, white-lipped peccaries, fruit-eating birds such as macaws and fruit crows, and large migratory catfish -- we hope to determine how much habitat they require to survive in healthy populations.
We are also studying the use of certain landscape features, such as palm swamps and clay licks, which may be essential for the survival of these and other related species. Data are gathered through capturing and radio-tagging individuals of each species and fitting them with radio collars that allow researchers to follow and gather information on the same individuals over time. By mapping and spatially analyzing locations of marked animals, researchers can determine annual home ranges and habitat preferences of each individual, any overlap among individuals, and possible changes in habitat use related to seasonality or to long-term climatic cycles such as El Niño events. By compiling habitat use data on a suite of species, this effort aims to provide a scientifically rigorous basis for justifying the size and spatial configuration of a network of protected and managed areas to conserve terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity in the southwestern Amazon, while this region is still relatively intact.
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