The paper by Knight et al. (2010), discussed on 5th November 2010, was an interesting piece of research to read and stimulated active and intense discussion among the group of conservation biologists present. The paper is interesting as it is the first (the novelty side was well emphasized by the authors across the publication) to try and incorporate the social dimension into the planning process to prioritize conservation effort. As authors point out, social factors are an important component that can greatly affect effectiveness of conservation effort and that has largely been overlooked in the past, despite the increasing need to deal with the human dimension as large tracts of land important for biodiversity in many countries, including Finland, are nowadays privately owned.
The issue was untangled by the authors by means of reporting a case study where, in order to quantify conservation opportunities, a questionnaire targeted at local stakeholders was used to map the social dimension in an area of high biodiversity value. The general idea of trying to incorporate social factors into conservation planning was well appreciated within the “conversation planning” group. It was also interesting to know how, from the questionnaire data, information on opportunities for conservation can be derived by ranking landowners into several categories, with the highest providing the best opportunity and thus should be the first to target in order to increase public participation and support to conservation initiatives.
However, the authors have taken the whole study on a very general level, thus lacking details on how this new social dimension could be included when planning conservation in a real world where more heterogeneous conditions exist (in terms of spacing of biodiversity and social factors) on a larger scale than the localized and rather homogeneous area considered in the study. What are the tools available, or to be implemented in the future, to achieve more cost-effective conservation based also on the social dimension is not clarified in the paper. In fact, the effectiveness of considering this new aspect is not assessed with respect to achieving conservation goals. How the landowners would behave when put in front of the real condition to decide how to manage their land is not discussed.
The role of the social dimension was at times overemphasized at the expenses of ecological knowledge and conservation planning, with the latter seemingly relegated to a secondary position when dealing with conservation on private land, while the former being the first option to consider. The strict divide and ranking of these two groups of dimensions was not appreciated, as the common belief is that both are important and can complement each other, and that the conservation planning, based on cost and ecological data, can be updated and implemented in a very flexible and dynamic process based on information derived from the social dimension. The question arising naturally from this reading is: how to get reliable proxies, if ever possible, from available and accessible spatial data to represent the social dimension and thus implement the effectiveness of conservation planning at the global scale? Any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.
Here you can find the paper:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01494.x/abstract