Reserve Portfolios

I.  Protected areas

   A.  Levels of protection
       -Wilderness
       -National Park
       -National Monument
       -Habitat management area
       -Protected landscape
       -Managed resource area

    B.  Do existing protected areas achieve conservation goals?
       - Fire and ice conservation
       - Often focused around geography, not biodiversity

       - Which biomes are protected?  Hoekstra, et al.

II.  Identifying areas to protect
    A. Gap Analysis tries to determine where biodiversity is falling through the cracks
       - Globally, 12.5% of mammal, amphibian, turtle, and threatened bird species unprotected
       - Gaps are not related to % of protected area
                Approaches to conservation that base targets on a % of country or biome conserved may not be effective in conserving remaining biodiversity

    B. Hotspots
       - Plant diversity (>0.5% of endemics)
        - Diversity of vertebrates (not fish
        - Habitat loss (>70%)

    C.  Priority Ecoregions
       - “Ecoregions are large areas of relatively uniform climate that harbour a characteristic set of species and ecological communities”
        - “The most outstanding examples of each major habitat type are included from every continent and ocean basin”
        - Priority regions determined by species richness, endemism, higher taxonomic uniqueness, extraordinary ecological or evolutionary phenomena, global rarity of the major habitat type

    D. Crisis ecoregions determined by how much has been lost and how much is protected

    E.  Note that:  
        - Biodiversity targets can be subjective
        - Costs not assessed
        - Funds do not target priorities

        -  Systematic Conservation Planning

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     F.  Economic considerations can be complex      
            - Impacts outside reserves
            - Conservation purchases may drive up land prices
            - Costs associated with maintaining reserves
            - Funds available for conservation may depend on conservation goal

    G.  Do priority schemes match up?
       - vary in their treatment of vulnerability and irreplaceability
       - They also do not tend to target funding based on where priorities say they should
             - 2-30% of funds go to priority areas
             - 3% overlap among areas for all organizations


IV.  Indicator species concepts.  Do they work?

    A. British survey 10 x 10 km grid for presence/absence of all sorts of species (employing 10's of thousands of volunteers)
       - Hotspots not correlated among taxa
       - Rare species not present in Hotspots

    B.  Global analysis
•        - For species richness of birds, mammals, amphibians, yes
        - For endemics, no
        - Also, no congruence for species richness, threatened, or endemics within groups (Orme, et al. 2005)